Let history worship at Laura’s sepulchre, if it chose, and choirs of nuns sing fruitless orisons. A great poet might have worshipped her, but only maggots enjoyed her now. Now that Francesco could not have me, his desire was flaming up. My body, too, hungered for more, but first we must endure this earthly fast. When I first lay in Francesco’s arms, I thought heaven well lost for mortal love, but I was learning the value of the immortal soul. Like Héloïse after she became a nun, I would enjoy an ardent correspondence with my Abélard. I had just settled myself at my table to begin a letter, when I heard Angière’s quick step. In her hand was a copper pan.
“May I share your fire? I’ve been helping Cook think up ways to use our surplus of apples. Apple confit, apple cider, apple butter. These are baked with cream. I brought a spoon for you as well.”
We sat side by side, passing the pan back and forth as we ate. “It is the winter solstice, an evening for contemplation,” I said. “The night hours are twice as long as the day’s. I feed on these silences in the Vaucluse.”
“Your thoughts seem to weigh more heavily on you here than they did in Avignon.”
“I have forty daughters now, not four. I do not wish to lose any of the souls in my keeping.”
“That is unlikely, since the Clarisses have settled in so well.” Her spoon clanged into the empty pot and her eyes met mine forthrightly. “Now, Solange, do not play abbess with me. When I came in, a smile was teasing your lips and I saw you hiding the letter that arrived today. I was the one who told the courier where to find you. Shall I guess whose seal was pressed into that green wax?”
My lips were curving like a child’s. “Francesco is asking for my opinion of his new poems. What harm can it do?”
“While I was waiting for the apples to bake, I remembered where I had last seen that coat of arms. It is on this.”
Angière laid a small object on my knee and peeled back the linen covering. I almost knocked it away in repulsion: a dried finger with an overgrown nail, such as sorcières used to curse their enemies or raise violent thunderstorms from the night air.
“Whose finger is this? Do you expect me to perform some necromancy with it?”
“Only if you wish to bring Petrarch back to you. Look more closely at the ring. Just before my mother was lowered into the de Sade tomb, my father opened her shroud to prove that the plague had not deformed her. He pulled off her glove to kiss her hand as a show for the funeral guests and was enraged to see this love-token from her poet. He could not wrench the ring over the swollen knuckle, so he cut off her finger in front of us all.”
We both stared at the finger, imagining Francesco presenting the ring to Laura, then Laura deceiving her husband by wearing gloves to hide it. Angière pointed out the dark strands twisted into the silver of the ring.
“Not only is that Petrarch’s coat of arms, that is his hair. This ring rightfully belongs to you, Solange. You are a better muse to him than my mother was. Now I will leave you to enjoy your memories of him in private.”
She left as she came, in a burst of quickness, our spoons rattling in the pot. When the wind banged the door, I rose to fasten it and shoot the bolt. I sat back in front of the fire to examine the finger. The ring would not come off because Laura’s skin adhered to the inside, gluing them together. At the resurrection, every soul would collect its body and any scattered parts thereof, even scraps of skin and hair like these. But I had no intention of letting Laura’s soul attract Francesco’s like a lodestone drawing iron. His verses had made her immortal—that was enough. I would not let them be united for eternity. I twisted the ring to loosen it, twisted and tugged until I freed it from the finger. Then I tossed the finger into the hottest part of the fire, watching with satisfaction as it shrivelled.
I scraped Laura’s dead skin from the ring and placed the ring on my own finger. In wearing it, I was guilty of no more than profane idolatry. When the last trump sounded, Francesco’s soul would be compelled to return to my corpse to collect his hair. But first, I must be patient until my eyes rolled in their sockets, the flesh fell from my finger, and the ring spun upon bare bone.
Forty-six
I
N THE MORNING
, I dressed in brilliant light, for the shutters had flown open before daybreak. The gusting wind had cleared the dark clouds and I inhaled the resin from broken pine branches. I put on my fur-lined cloak to inspect the abbey to ensure that the nuns were at their customary tasks. Then I carried my writing materials to the cloister and settled into my carrel in the morning sun. I dipped my quill to write my first letter to Francesco to advise him where the lines were clumsy in his new poems and how he might repair them.
But these fine thoughts were anchored to a scratchy quill running short of ink. The ink-pot itself was dry, for I had left it unstoppered overnight. I went down the cellar steps to hunt for the new bottles of ink and found them next to Elisabeth’s cellar records. The ledgers were all neatly labelled, except for an old one hidden behind the others, with covers so warped they had split the dark red leather. Elisabeth had left it unlocked. If she had been recording more than our inventory of stores, this book might bear a clue to her unhealthy piety. I unsnapped the tarnished clasp and the book swung open near the end. I began to read.
Now here is the true legend of Saint Marie-Ange, who saw visions when yet within her mother’s womb. The Holy Ghost descended at Pentecost to bless her birth in Avignon in the year 1309. Suddenly there came a joyful sound and the newborn saint stood erect, hair ablaze, and spake in tongues. Her prophecy confounded devils and delighted sages. While in her ecstasies, she apprehended not with mortal eye and ear but through the eternal soul. When not above five years of age, this glorious saint dedicated herself to the sacred Benedictines at Clairefontaine-on-the-Sorgue, called
claire
for the clarity of its waters and
fontaine
for the fountain of the Sorgue. Soon afterwards, she saw a
unicorn
, that is, Our Lord, resting his head in the lap of a lady in a
closed garden
, which is to say the Virgin’s intact womb. Thereafter, she had a vision of an unborn calf with seven black spots, a dread augury that seven popes would rule in Babylon-on-the-Rhône.
A saint’s life—an odd book for Elisabeth to keep in her cellar. Even odder, the words resonated sharply with details of my life. I had seen Mother Agnes bequeath this battered ledger to Elisabeth when she was on her deathbed. With a thundering heart, I recognized the scarlet ledger, darkened by years of handling, in which the abbess had recorded my youthful visions. For much of my childhood, it had sat on the abbess’s shelf as a symbol of her hope that I would bring renown to Clairefontaine. As I continued to read, the cellar’s creeping damp gave me a rash of shivers.
When the age of majority was upon her, Saint Marie-Ange did not take the easy way by becoming the virgin bride of Christ, but took the hard way through the mortification of this world. When the devil accosted her, she struck him down, her face aflame with just ire, saying, “Begone, sting of sting, dung of dung, poison of poison.” She saved the city of Avignon by driving back the artillery of thunderstorm and lightning, and forced the Pope
called John, who was but a partridge trussed up in priestly spoils, to recant his heresy about the Beatific Vision.
Just as grapes are trod and crushed before they are brought to the barrel, so Saint Marie-Ange must needs be harried and threshed in this world before she is brought to the granary of heaven. She was examined in the presence of cardinals and princes, and the truth of her auguries upheld by Pope Clement. The poet laureate could not cast her down, though he blasphemed her as the Whore of Babylon, her cup overflowing with the lewdness of her fornication. With sagacious tongue, she drove back nail for nail.
Now as to her miracles and charisms, wondrous to record. She had a chalice on her flesh, which did not bleed when pricked. Never befouled, her immaculate womb conceived felicitously as did Saint Anne’s. She became the first amongst women in the city of Avignon for her wealth, for her beauty of form, and for the pretentious splendour of her attire. She commanded the moon, drove back the flood, and saved the Pope from the plague, which she miraculously repelled.
At last, rising in her volupty in the flames of martyrdom, this twice-born saint renounced the stew of Avignon, for she deemed all the joys of this life to be as excrement. When her feet stepped through the narrow gate of Clairefontaine, the abbess gave up the ghost, crying, “It is accomplished.” The chapter knelt and with one voice elected her their new abbess, but she pushed away the cup until the skin hung upon her bones and all the hairs fell from her head, like a whore penitent. She is now hailed far and wide as the Sibyl of the Rhône and is consulted for her miracles by pilgrims and for her apt prophecy by popes and kings and even poets.
At the end, she will be taken up in a column of fire, with body and soul intact, like Mary of Magdalene and Mary of Egypt. At the second coming, she will sit in glory in the Choir of Angels and Martyrs, far above the lowly corps of resurrected
mortals, who will only gaze upon her from afar and never more defile her with their impure touch.
This was the last entry in the ledger, but many had preceded it. At the beginning, the handwriting was Mother Agnes’s, page after page of plain, workman-like lettering in stark contrast to the enflamed words. Latin phrases twisted and embellished childhood events so that I hardly knew myself. Even when I escaped the abbey, the abbess did not falter. She never gave up her belief that I would be a saint like Hildegarde of Bingen. The more she heard of me from afar, the more she struggled to seek a purpose to my life.
This was not just the abbess’s work, for I could see Elisabeth in it as well. As the abbess had aged, Elisabeth had become her legs, travelling to Avignon more to fill her ears than to fill the abbey’s cellar. Towards the end of the ledger, Mother Agnes’s penmanship became shaky, then was replaced by Elisabeth’s heavy, black Provençal. Here was the Elisabeth of my childhood where I least expected to find her, the Elisabeth who had tried to capture souls in goblets. Certainly, her whimsy had been put to strange use, for she had written a
Life of Saint Marie-Ange
that had the power to destroy me. I had forgotten how hard her punches could hit. She had documented a case for my sainthood, turning herself into the advocatus Dei, God’s advocate, in a trial for canonization. The church’s most recent saint, Yves, had been as flawed as I was, but his worshippers were dogged. Led by a God’s advocate as zealous as Elisabeth, they drove back all contrary evidence until the devil’s advocate was crushed, and Yves, poor man, was canonized with gusto by Pope Clement himself.
Now I saw where destiny had been leading me. This was to be my final battle: not the fight against Laura, not even the bloody battle of death itself, but the fight for how the world would know me hereafter. Was I to be remembered as a bloodless saint having her Life read to nuns eating in the refectory, or as a woman who had lived and loved?
If Elisabeth succeeded, I would be elevated to the choir of saints, where I would see the Blessed Face of God and be denied all human love thenceforth.
Before Elisabeth could present her case for canonization to the Pope, I had to die. Here in this abbey, Elisabeth and I were rivals once again, outwaiting and outsmarting each other. If I burnt the scarlet ledger, she would write in another one and hide it in a more secret place. Instead, I needed to live long enough to bury the ledger with her in her tomb.
But what if I died before her? By outliving me, she would control my destiny, unless I could outwit her. I pushed the ledger back into its hiding place, chose a bottle of the best ink, and carried it into the cloister. I settled into the carrel with my fur-lined cloak wrapped around me and Francesco’s ring displayed upon my finger. I had not come this far to let Elisabeth’s piety defeat me now. I skewered a fresh sheet of vellum and took a moment to savour its heady scent, for I was about to write the most important document of my life. I sharpened my quill and dipped it generously in ink.
My daughters,
Today I begin my tale to turn you into the devil’s advocate—the keepers of my destiny. If you are reading this, I am dead, and you must take arms against Elisabeth, my foe. To equip you for this battle, I will write my own Life to set the record straight, a livre du voir-dire in which my sins speak loudly in their own defence. Safeguard this story and guard against all false biographies. Do not let the wrath of love, nor fire, nor the sword, nor devouring age conspire to destroy this book.
It is time I told you of my birth, and my betrothal to Francesco Petrarch and the events that followed, to prove that I have led a full and carnal life. My sins of harlotry and pride cling greedily like scraps of flesh on bone, but I have worse sins to confess. I am guilty of killing Laura. By drinking the wormwood oil that I gave to Angière, Laura poisoned herself, as I intended. Most of all, I am
guilty of a love that outlasts death. Can I be blamed for desiring to see my lover’s countenance more than the Blessed Face of God? I have loved my poet too long to let him slip between my fingers now.
I first heard my mother’s heartbeat from inside her dark, surrounding womb. It mingled with my own heart’s rhythm, then changed to a harsher, more strident beat. It was then that I had my first and most famous vision of a man kneeling in a purple cassock and biretta. I could see him as if I were looking out a window made of glass. He was framed by curtains that fell in crimson folds around my mother, who lay beneath him on the bed. His face was as clear to me as the blood vessels inside her womb, his skin foxed with a tracery of veins. I looked straight into his eyes and they were as hard and blue as lapis lazuli …