All pain forgotten, her face glowing, Angière held the baby to her breast and the infant’s lips closed over the nipple. “Solange, you must be her godmother. I’ll call her Laura, for she has my mother’s hair.”
As soon as the plague moved north, we opened the priory gate, to learn that one-third of Avignon’s courtiers and citizens had died, leaving many dwellings empty. The city’s value had fallen so low that Pope Clement bought it from Queen Joanna, granddaughter of King Robert the Wise, for a scant eighty thousand florins. Now that Avignon was Clement’s lawful property, he pledged to restore her former glory. The stonemasons’ chisels had resumed sizing blocks for the new perimeter wall that would protect the outlying poor from mercenaries.
I wrote to Guido to beg news of Francesco and my son. Although Florence had been ravaged, Guido reported that the Black Death had bypassed Parma, where Francesco was a canon living in a garden house more ample than his retreat in the Vaucluse. Now eleven, his ties to me severed by law, Giovanni was being tutored by the scholar Moggio de’ Moggi. My joy was absolute, for though Francesco and Giovanni were far from me, they were together and had survived the plague.
Other letters arrived gradually, which we read to one another in the cloister. Angière’s sister wrote that Angière’s husband, the seigneur de Bédarrides, had died just before the plague withdrew. Angière creased the letter to sail it into the rosebush, where it settled jauntily on the briars.
She pulled the pins from her hair to toss it about her ears. “Wash my hair for me? I no longer need to wear it coiled like a matron.”
The two little girls helped me fill a tub with hot water. We added camomile to bring out the flaxen colour, stirred up a frothy brew, and dunked Angière’s head until she came up laughing. While I brushed Angière’s hair dry in the sun, Félicité watched a sparrow bathing in the water we had spilled.
“How did the prioress’s soul get inside that bird?” Félicité asked.
The sparrow was now on top of the rosebush, combing its wings with its beak. Satisfied that its feathers were dry, it began to preen and warble. It did indeed look like the plain brown prioress, whose presence we so missed.
“Who told you that it did?” I asked.
“The nuns.” She leapt up to chase after Anne-Prospère.
When the midday gong sounded, the Clarisses roused themselves to walk to the refectory, leaving their needlework and letters where they fell. Angière retrieved her letter from the thorns and smoothed it out to read the rest.
“My sister says that she saw Francesco Petrarch haunting our mother’s grave in the de Sade chapel.”
Laura again. Would I never be rid of her? “Perhaps your sister only saw Laura’s wandering spirit.”
“It was no ghost,” Angière said. “Petrarch’s defilement of the tomb was real enough to offend the Cordeliers, who are paid by my father to sing orisons for my mother. They sent a runner to alert my father, but my sister intercepted the message and went to the chapel to halt Petrarch herself. Apparently, he had received a letter in Parma about Laura’s death, mounted his horse, and ridden straight through without stopping. My sister writes that he was saddle-mad, clawing at the tomb and weeping like a madman.”
I was ashamed that my own elation at Laura’s death had made me forget what Francesco would feel. I imagined Francesco weeping over a pavingstone that looked like all the others, carrying death inside him as real as the corpse that had been rotting for months beneath the
chapel floor. “Most likely he was driven mad by grief,” I said. “How did your sister make him stop?”
“She says that he became calm as soon as she appeared, perhaps confusing her in his troubled mind with Laura. Of all my sisters, Gorcente looks most like our mother and was wearing her seed-pearl cap.”
Where had he gone? Back to his house in the Vaucluse, I guessed. His old servants would nurse him until he was strong enough to ride back to Parma and our son. I hoped that, like a sleepwalker, Francesco would remember little. He would stop composing poems about Laura. Although it pained me that he had not sought me out, my daughters were safer without him knowing about them. My duty was to keep them safe from evil, including high-handed fathers. Someday, when Francesco could no longer threaten to take the little girls from me, I might tell them that a sublime poet had fathered them.
In the weeks that followed, I turned my attention to restoring the priory to working order. We had no servants, no priest to confess us, and no obedientiaries to lead us. Worse, we would soon have an empty larder. We had survived the plague summer by eating dried foodstuffs, but our stocks were dwindling. It would soon be Michaelmas, time to buy stores for winter, but when the prioress had died, so had the key to her reckoning system. From what I could tell reading her accounts, the Poor Clares had no income. The prioress had been selling off priory lands and now there was nothing to sell but the priory itself.
The Poor Clares were as little endowed with common sense as with money. Franciscans they might be, but they spent their days like noblewomen, gossiping or doing needlework in the shade or sun, according to the season. Amongst the chattering, ineffectual Clarisses, I often found myself longing for the silence and intellectual rigour of the Benedictines.
I was trying to decipher the record books in the prioress’s house, when I heard two of the nuns quarrelling outside my window over a misshapen loaf of bread. Drawing my miséricorde from my belt tongue, I said, “If you give me the loaf, I will halve it for you.”
“It is all right,” the youngest replied, relinquishing it to me. “She may have it all. You mean to shame us by showing yourself as wise as Solomon.”
“Since you take my meaning so well, make another batch of bread. Make loaves for all the sisters this time. Make them evenly round and put leaven in them so that they will rise!”
They tucked their hands into their fur-lined sleeves.
“What is it now?” I asked.
“Our salt cellar is empty and there is no more flour.”
I had been locked up with the priory accounts too long. If we were out of flour, we would soon be out of food, since the weevils had infested the other grains. It was time for me to leave the priory to take my daughters to a better place. I made the announcement to the Poor Clares after a spartan meal in the refectory.
“The priory of Saint Clare is without income,” I told them. “There is no more fuel and the cellar cannot feed you through the winter. We can live without meat, but not without bread and salt.”
They sat in silence, as if they all had indigestion, and perhaps they did. Outside, the wind hummed disconsolately, producing an irritating vibration in the wall.
“You must choose between returning to your families, if the plague has spared them,” I said, “or following me where destiny calls me. I have written to the abbess of Clairefontaine to beg asylum for us, but I can wait no longer for her answer. Tomorrow, my daughters and I set off at dawn. If you wish to come, you must straighten your backs to carry your own goods upon your shoulders.”
Forty-three
W
E LEFT THROUGH
Porte Magnanen, and followed the moat beside the city wall until it became the canal. Here, beside the cloth-workers’ paddlewheels, I saw the sign of the Cheval Blanc, where I had sought refuge in my fifteenth year. As we walked along the canal, it widened into the Sorgue, which became swift and clear as the city fell behind us, although the Pope’s fortress refused to shrink, when we looked back, for some time longer.
Trailing behind me in a disorderly line were eleven Poor Clares, one novice, two little girls hopping and skipping, and Angière with her infant in a sling across her chest. We followed the Sorgue upstream past bourgs, past farmers’ fields, until it turned north, and we parted company. We stopped frequently for Angière to feed baby Laura and for the Clarisses to rub one another’s feet. When we had walked the friars’ path deep into the Vaucluse, we encountered the Sorgue a second time, and I glimpsed the distant cliff where the river surged from the black cavern of Fontaine-de-Vaucluse.
After another half-league of walking, a cloud shifted to reveal the Clairefontaine bell-tower with its ironwork cage. At last, the walled
abbey came into view, and Félicité and Anne-Prospère began to run. Both were five, my age when I had first come to Clairefontaine. Here, Félicité would grow swift of foot and strong of limb, learning to sleep through the night. The Benedictine discipline of mind and body would nourish my daughters as it had nourished me. The high gates swung open to reveal twenty-four Benedictines in order of rank, headed by the ancient sacristan with her hands wringing her holy book, who was overwhelmed by our noise and disarray.
Elisabeth was the first to speak. I knew who she was at once, for my paternoster beads dangled from her bony wrist. “We bid you welcome to the abbey. The plague has so reduced our numbers that we have need of helping hands, even ones as soft as these.”
Although few words were spoken, our welcome was blithe. The Benedictines put their fingers to their lips to silence the Poor Clares, then signalled that they would be well fed in the refectory in spite of the hour. Elisabeth washed my hands in the lavatorium, as was due an honoured guest.
I kept my voice low. “I am pleased to see you, Elisabeth.”
She dried my hands with a linen towel. “You must call me Sister Martha.” Her eyes veered away, tracking the obedientiaries through the cloister. They were not going into the refectory with the others, but towards the abbess’s house, perhaps to decide what to do about me.
“I beg you—do not let Mother Agnes turn me out.”
“Mother Agnes is dying of old age,” she said. “She refused to believe you died in the plague and told us you would come, even before your letter arrived. She has waited for you so long she is living off her own flesh, taking nothing by mouth.”
Elisabeth gestured that I should follow her to the abbess’s house. Mother Agnes had proven stronger than the plague, but was now in a state of grace, propped at a slant in bed and ready to breathe her last. I straightened my back against the doorway, trying to stop my body from shaking as I took everything in. Mother Agnes was frail, yet there was an
immense presence in her. Elisabeth joined the obedientiaries pressed along the inner wall. Each awaited her instructions holding the sign of her office: Elisabeth with her cellar keys, the sacristan with her testament, the choir-mistress with a sheet of music, and the infirmarian-vintner with a bleeding bowl. Many I had known were missing, felled by the passing years or by the plague. Sister Raymonde must have died, for the gardener was new, as was the stockbreeder, the beekeeper, and the chambress.
Mother Agnes called Elisabeth to her. “Sister Martha, your task is to continue my life’s work.”
She gave her the key to a battered ledger on the writing table, the boards so warped that the leather cover had split. Elisabeth bowed her head, her face thin and anxious, and I wondered why she had received such an act of penance. The abbess continued through the other obedientiaries, her voice weakening as she assigned tasks to each.
At last, she asked, “Where is Solange?”
Either her eyesight had dimmed, or she did not recognize me. I dipped my knee, realizing too late that the gesture spoke of the vanity of court. Even the azure of my robe was an effrontery in the midst of black habits with grey veils. I sank to my knees beside her bed, my lips blundering through a half-remembered prayer. She had mothered me, counselled me, loved me. I hoped she had not heard of all that I had been. How much of my fame had swum upstream to the abbey? She pushed my head into her lap with the strength of death in her, as if she meant to humble me.
“I have been waiting for you.” She removed her chain of office and kissed the seal. “My daughters, kneel to your new abbess.”
Caught off-guard, I could only manage a single word: “No.” Even though the chain hovered, I did not raise my head. “I do not wish to become a nun, much less an abbess. I came to offer myself as the abbey’s librarian.” Perhaps she could not hear, for she dropped the chain heavily onto my collarbones. Tears stung my eyes, cleansing them of the grit of Avignon. “Lift this burden from me,” I entreated Elisabeth, but she did not move, nor did any of the nuns.
I lifted the chain from my own neck, lurched to my feet, and hung it from the bed-hook, where Mother Agnes could see it. However, she had closed her eyes and folded herself inside the bed-covers to die. My courage buckled and the obedientiaries guided me into the study to minister to me. The chambress sat me on a chair so she could wash my blistered feet, Elisabeth brought me wine, and the infirmarian began to bleed me to balance my humours. I rested my eyes on the abbess’s map, still nailed to her wall, while the nuns went in and out, discussing the quality of her breath, which was now as troubled as a rasp crossing iron. Then, all at once, the rasping from the bedchamber stopped and the infirmarian jerked around. Her bowl and lancet clattered onto the floor, spilling my blood. I pressed a cloth on the wound and went into the bedchamber to find the obedientiaries swarming around Mother Agnes. As the last pulse drove through her, they raised their eyes to witness her soul’s escape and joined their palms in lamentation. After four score years, Mother Agnes had given up her ghost to God.
That same day, the abbess was carried into the church on a bier in her heraldic splendour as Agnès de Clairefontaine. Every nun was in her appointed place and the servants, monks, and villagers crowded the public area behind the screen. The sacristan reminded us that the abbess’s forebears had founded the abbey on their ancestral lands and that their sons had fought in the crusades, then the abbess was laid in a tomb carved with the Clairefontaine arms. Although I had rejected her chain of office, I carried her brother’s sword with Saint Peter’s toenail shining in the pommel. When the mourning bell ceased, I climbed the church tower to stand beneath a clean, unclouded sky to strain my ears for the greater tones of the bell at Notre-Dame-des-Doms, three leagues away.