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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
'A rich, surprising and devastating story of a female institution long-forgotten' Marj Charlier, author of The Rebel Nun A heretical text, a vengeful husband, a forbidden love... It's 1310 and Paris is alive with talk of the trial of the Templars. Religious repression is on the rise, and the smoke of execution pyres blackens the sky above the city. But sheltered behind the walls of Paris's great beguinage, a community of women are still free to work, study and live their lives away from the domination of men. When a wild, red-haired child clothed in rags arrives at the beguinage gate one morning, with a sinister Franciscan monk on her tail, she sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter the peace of this little world―plunging it into grave danger. ________________ READERS ARE LOVING THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS 'A colorful fictional tapestry beautifully presented and blessed with a terrific cast of exquisitely drawn characters. This literary accomplishment is also a stunning portrait of urban life and customs in medieval France. Highly recommended' Jean Luc 'It is hard to find good historical novels set in the middle ages that focus on ordinary lives - especially women's lives - rather than on royalty and political (mostly male) power struggles. This is a refreshing exception' Fiona 'An excellent historical fiction set at beginning of XV century. It mixes fiction and history, features strong and intriguing characters, and I loved the storytelling... Highly recommended' Anna Maria
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For my father, always
Contents
Cast of Characters
Beguines
mar guerite de porete, a beguine from Valenciennes, author of The Mirror of Simple Souls
ysabel, a herbalist and hospitaller at the Beguinage
maheut, a redheaded girl found outside the Beguinage gates one morning
ade, a pious and educated widow residing at the Beguinage
agnes, ysabel’s assistant in the infirmary. Her cousin geoffroy is a prominent Dominican.
perrenelle la chanevacière, the mistress of the Beguinage; succeeded by jeanne la bricharde and then armelle
guillaumette, gatekeeper
clémence, daughter of bourgeois pierre and alice de crété
jeanne du faut, merchant and mistress of the Silk House
béatrice la grande, her assistant
juliotte, a mute girl employed in the Silk House
ameline, embroiderer
thomasse, servant at the Silk House
marie osanne, another notions dealer in rue Troussevache
basile, weaver engaged in sharp practices
Others
philip the fair, King of France, grandson of St Louis IX who founded the Beguinage. His daughter, Isabelle, married the King of England and his three sons also made important alliances, though the Valois dynasty was notoriously cursed.
grégoire, the supervising canon, a Dominican
guillaume de nogaret, Chancellor to King Philip
clement v, pope
jacques de molay, Grandmaster of the Knights Templar
william of paris, Inquisitor General
humbert, a Franciscan monk from Valenciennes, former student at the Sorbonne
jean de queyran, Franciscan master at Valenciennes monastery, defender of marguerite
guillebert, husband to maheut
brother geoffroy, agnes’s cousin and Dominican prelate
robert de sorbon, theologian under Louis IX and defender of the beguines
pierre de crété, burgomaster, silk dealer, and patron of the Beguinage, married to dame alice
master giacomo, a merchant from Lombardy
bernard, fellow student of humbert, syphilitic clerk
héloise, ade’s sister-in-law
Preface
In the area of paris called the Marais rises a broken tower, at the corner of the rue Charlemagne and the rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. It marks the northern edge of an ancient wall more than eighty yards long that is punctuated by a second tower. These are the vestiges of the enclosure built at the end of the twelfth century by King Philip Augustus, a curtain wall to protect the city. Centuries later, the buildings of the Lycée Charlemagne were erected upon this souvenir of medieval wars. At its southern border, the wall joins the rue de l’Ave-Maria, named after the convent that occupied the site long before the school. But in the fourteenth century this street had another name: it was called ‘rue des Beguines’.
Surrounded by grey-paved alleyways, this quadrilateral now muffles the sounds of the city, leaving the air free for the trills of birds, the cries of children playing ball, the laughter of adolescent girls and boys mingling their uninhibited voices. But few people are aware that this site once contained an institution which was unique in France: the Great Beguinage of Paris that was founded by King Louis IX, known as Saint Louis.
For almost a hundred years in the Middle Ages, a succession of remarkable women lived on this site and in its surroundings. Unclassifiable and hard to categorize, these women had refused both marriage and the nun’s cloister. Here they prayed, worked, studied, and had a haven from which they could roam the town as they pleased, hosting some friends and travelling to visit others, disposing of their wealth as they wished, and even being allowed to bequeath it to their sisters. They had a freedom and independence that women in the Middle Ages had not known before—and would not know again for centuries. At the time, not all of them were aware of how special this freedom was, but some fought hard to preserve it.
For years I walked the streets of the Marais looking for the traces they had left behind. Day after day, they came back to me. I saw their shadows on the ground—now strong, now faint—I heard their laughter and their songs, the sound of their footsteps on the cobblestones, I felt on my skin the same sun that once warmed them, breathed the scents of the nearby Seine. We dreamt, trembled and strolled alongside each other, like companions whom time has separated but whose desires, fears and rebellions come together in a single echo.
Prologue
1st June 1310
If not for the silence, you might think it was a festival day.
There is a crowd in the Place de Grève on this Monday before Ascension. All the people of the city are here. Merchants and clerks, citizens and craftsmen, schoolchildren and clerics, rakes and vagabonds, those who will do anything for the smallest coin and labourers who come to sell their manpower at the port. The heat of bodies pressed together, their smell. Grimy skin and fetid breaths mingle their exhalations with stenches from the street belonging to the tanners and slimy odours from the river. At the balcony windows of the fine dwellings around the square stand ladies and gentlemen dressed in vivid colours.
Shouts and cries, the shanties sung by boatmen and porters, all suddenly lapse into silence in a long wave rippling out from the riverbank. All that can be heard above the murmuring of the spectators are the bang of wood on stone as boat keels clatter against the quay, and the anxious lapping of the Seine.
Everyone’s eyes are trained on the centre of the square, where stands a pyre similar to those that have been erected on the same site for carnivals and for the Feast of Saint-Jean. But instead of masked dancers and young apprentices jumping through the bonfire flames, now you see only a woman walking up the pyre, her bare feet stepping over the faggot bundles, with black hair and a long chemise stuck to her body.
She is tall but also frail, her gnarled neck protruding from the pierced sailcloth they have stuck over her head. She stands erect, unchanged by the long months of captivity, the many interrogations, the silence she has maintained. The authorities took this for arrogance. But she simply had nothing to say, or anyway, nothing they could understand.
A little further off is a second pyre. Tied to the stake, a man with a battered face is sagging on his legs, a Jew accused of having spat on images of the Virgin.
But she is the one everybody is watching.
Humbert finds himself a few yards away from her, his broad shoulders towering above the crowd. He wants to get closer, close enough to see the shut eyelids of the condemned woman and her knees showing below the shroud covering her. He jostles the shoulder of the matron pressed against him and slips between spectators whose unconscious surges bring them to the heart of the square.
Suddenly, on his right, he notices another figure pushing forward through the press. A slender silhouette enveloped in a grey cape eases its way between the spectators.
Now both of them are a few steps from the pyre.
The executioner is waiting, torch in hand. Close by stands a Dominican in his white robe and black mantle: William of Paris, the Inquisitor. Another man is wearing a sword and feathered cap; the provost steps forward and places a book on the straw at the woman’s feet. She bends her head slightly, opens her eyes wide, as if in surprise. At that moment a breeze sweeps up the river. The silhouetted figure that was advancing in parallel to Humbert pushes back the crowd, advances resolutely to the pyre and lets her hood fall.
A mass of red hair tumbles over the dark cape, ruffled by the breeze.
The tormented woman turns her head. She seems to gaze at the young girl who has just revealed herself and to recognize her.
Humbert also stares at the girl, stupefied. Never would he have expected to find her here, nor in that habit.
The executioner takes a step towards the stake. Humbert lowers his head and turns away. He follows the redhead with his eyes as she covers her head with the hood again; another girl, similarly garbed, grabs her by the hand and pulls her away. Then he shoulders his way back to the wharf.
Soon the smell of wood and of flesh being consumed overcomes all other odours. And the cries of the crowd, excited and compassionate, cover the cries of the man at the stake. Perhaps also the cry of the woman who is being burned alive. For nobody could expect her to remain silent until the end.
Part One
January to June 1310
Among us are women—we do not know whether to call them seculars or nuns, since they live neither inthe world nor outside it.
gilbert de tournai
(1200–1284)
1
Leonor, her grandmother, had said it would be so. Watching the farmsteads in the surrounding villages being abandoned one by one, children with torn clothes and empty bellies leaving their families and parishes for the town, she had told Ysabel, ‘A day will come when the shape of our world will be transformed to the point that people my age will no longer recognize it. I will be gone soon, but you, keep your eyes open.’
This January morning of 1310, Ysabel rises when the first glimmer filters through the window of her room. She dresses warmly and, as she does every day, goes to her garden. Here she kneels beside a bed enclosed by low fences woven of hazel branches, her palms planted on the soil. She contemplates the new decade that is beginning and wonders what her grandmother would have made of it. Her grandmother whose bones must long have been picked clean in the earth where she wanted to be buried.
Has the world changed? Ysabel herself does not know what to think. She has known three kings. Louis IX died well before her second husband, and before she decided to enter the Great Beguinage. Louis’s successor Philip III, ‘the Bold’, died in his turn. So on 6th January 1286, under the rose window that had just been installed in the Cathedral of Reims, the archbishop anointed with holy oil a strikingly handsome youth’s head, breast and back. Ever since, Philip (known as ‘the Fair’ for his good looks) has ruled the kingdom. He is a horseman, a hunter who even in the most grave and solemn moments (such as during the birth of his son Charles) continues to chase game and run his hounds in the forests of Orleans and every other hunting domain in the north of his realm. He is opinionated and efficient, and has been raised to worship his grandfather, a venerated figure who is on his way to being canonized as Saint Louis.
With such a sovereign, and under the protection of such an ancestor, the kingdom has seemed more powerful than ever. Full of energy. The towns bristling with spires and pointed gables, the rivers and seas plied by barges and ships, their holds full of wine, salt and cloth. For decades now, French lands have experienced no great war, suffered no plague or famine. What ill could befall them?
And yet…
Since the jubilee of 1300, a year that the pope had declared holy—a time of pardon and jubilation, with a plenary indulgence promised to every believer—the more keen-eyed amongst the king’s subjects have begun to see signs in the heavens.
The winters have become steadily harsher. In 1303, a frost scorched the earth. In the summer of 1305, drought withered the crops in their fields. In 1308, on the first Saturday after Ascension, a snowstorm made more destructive by huge hailstones devastated the region around Paris. The wheat harvest was lost, and grapes died along with their vines. And on 30th October 1309, a wind blew for an hour that was so strong it made the stone arches of Saint-Denis cathedral tremble.
That same year, on the last day of January, in the early afternoon, the sun conjugated with the moon in the twentieth degree of Aquarius. The eclipse lasted more than two hours before disappearing. Ysabel saw the air above her garden tinged with red and saffron hues.
What to make of these signs? The old woman sighs. Under her fingers, the topsoil is cracked, hardened by the frost. She scratches the cold crust, thrusts her hand into the earth, pulls up a clod and kneads it until the soil is soft and warm once more. Crumbled between her fingers, it gives off the fine smell of the manure she spread long before the first frost, cowpats supplied by a peasant from the marshes, and rotten straw to mix with them. As long as spring comes, she thinks, the land will be generous. In this little world where she has chosen to live, no change seems likely to take hold.
She lingers a moment to sniff the earth’s spicy tang. Finally she puts her hands on her thighs and stands, feeling the stiffness in her leg joints.
The garden is laid out on the southern flank of the chapel. She turns the corner of the chunky limestone building in no hurry—there is still time before the morning office—and reaches the courtyard about which her sisters’ dwellings are squeezed. Through open shutters, she glimpses the halos of oil lamps and candlesticks and moving silhouettes, and hears the clinks of pots and basins.
Here in the Beguinage all is so peaceful. She has not forgotten her astonishment when she pushed open this gate for the first time. Exhausted by a ten-day trip from her native Burgundy, aching from the juddering of the cart and nights spent in bad inns, dazed by her journey across Paris. In those days, the only town she knew was Autun, where one of her relatives lived. Paris had seemed a monster, an ogre in a shimmering robe, filled with vitality and vigour but with a heavy, crushing tread and fetid breath. The crowds in the narrow streets made even darker by the buildings’ corbels, porticoes and suspended balconies, the calls of shopkeepers, the cries of waffle and wafer sellers, cobblers, milliners, vendors of frippery, their stalls crowding the street along with spitted joints of roasting meat, everywhere goods being carried hither and thither in bundles on men’s backs or loaded onto carts, the animals that jostled you, horses and pigs and stray dogs, the mud, the slops and detritus, the frightful smell of the chamber pots emptied from windows practically onto the heads of those in the street below. When the gate of the Beguinage finally closed behind her, her head still ringing, it was as if Ysabel had plunged into a pool of water, so deep was the calm that reigned inside the compound.
An oasis in the heart of the city, a secure enclave. Abutting the city wall to the east, sheltered to the north by the lofty houses of the rue des Poulies-Saint-Paul, protected to the west by the buildings of the rue du Fauconnier, where the entrance lay, shielded from the river and its traffic to the south by the fortified Barbeau tower, whose defensive chains stretched across the Seine to the Château de la Tournelle on the other bank. A stronghold, but there were no virile voices here. A citadel for women, not a prison.
She had heard a rustling of wings—a tit landing on a house gable—and a young girl’s laughter spilling through an open window… She remembers having raised her hands in thanksgiving to the luminous sky above.
*
Now she stands shivering in the middle of the courtyard. Even within the shelter of the walls, the cold is sharp and the wind whistles along stones glistening with frost. Jerked out of her reverie, Ysabel pulls her woollen cloak around her and tells herself it is time to prepare for the morning office in the chapel. A cry from the street stops her.
‘My milk, buy my good milk!’
The first cry of the morning, to be followed by the cries of the bathhouses and the wine sellers, then of the sellers of fruit and broad beans. The song of the city. Ysabel hesitates for a moment, then makes for the gate. A bowl of creamy milk, fresh from the udder. That should ease the nostalgia for the countryside that usually grips her on leaving her garden.
The gatekeeper is in her little house near the entrance. The old beguine knocks on the door. Guillaumette appears, her bust rolling over her thick hips.
‘I am going to buy a little milk. Would you like some?’
Guillaumette smiles, pushes the key into the lock. The door resists so she leans her shoulder into it, bumping into a figure lying on the ground against the doorjamb.
A thin child, dressed in a dirty cape, her face hidden by the hood, no doubt a beggar hoping for charity from the good women of the Beguinage.
Guillaumette is about to shoo her away, but Ysabel stops her.
Under the pointed chin that the child presses down into her neck dangles a lock of hair. Long and red.
Ysabel bends over and puts her hand on the hunched body.
‘Come, little one, you must be frozen in this cold.’
2
The widower came alone to the morning office and knelt in the first row. Facing him, the young girls form a tight group, their eyes fixed on the choir-mistress. The clacking of footsteps on the stone floor, the rustling of stiff clothing. Throats cleared. Silence. One voice rises, alone and vibrant.
‘O, fighters for the flower, borne on a thornless branch, you are the voice of the world.’
Ade closes her eyes. A gust of cold air slips beneath her dress, gives her goosepimples despite her woollen stockings, chills her feet stiff. With aching muscles and head gripped with fatigue, she tries to follow the singing, to slip into the throbbing rhythm of the long-drawn-out syllables, so elaborately modulated. But the words of the letter she received the day before still echo in her head.
Her eyes are closed, but she feels the presence of the man in front of her, his body heavily bundled in a cloak lined with squirrel fur. She knows him. He is one of the most generous donors to the Beguinage, an alderman of the city who has just lost his young wife in childbirth. He has asked the choir to remain after the service to sing in her memory the antiphons she loved so much. All of them were moved by this request, and Ade ought to be too. But the proximity of the widower prevents her from concentrating on the singing. Even under the sweet perfume of the wax flowing from the candles, he seems to give off a musky odour that emanates from his coat, or perhaps from his beard, which she knows is thick and black.
A brief pause. The soloist’s voice hangs in the air. Then the choir in turn picks up the verses. The young voices roll out in harmony; a pure line rises up to the chapel’s vaults.
Ade concentrates on the voices. She remembers others that lulled her during hours of rest in the convent, where as a child she was sent in order to complete her education. The echo of the nuns’ sung prayers in the convent had slipped through the walls of her cell, more luminous than the rays filtering through the small skylight.
Had she been aware, back then, of the peace that the orderly world of the convent gave her? The silent processions of the nuns through the cloister’s galleries. The five daily offices and the chanting of the psalms that ordered time, marking out the daytime and night-time hours. The peaceful mornings spent in the scriptorium perfecting her Latin, as she wielded the goosequill or watched the copyists working from dictation, attentive to the voices of the readers, to the scratching of pens on vellum, the metallic smell of the ink.
She would love to return to that place; without understanding why, she was happy there. The Beguinage is a compromise. A temporary home. She knows that she lives on the margins of this world that hums with laughter, prayer and daily routine. Her home is set apart from the rest, against the outer wall, and there she spends her long silent days, sharing the housekeeping tasks with a young and discreet servant girl. The rest of the time she spends in reading and silent contemplation. But it is difficult to be truly alone here, where hundreds of women live without the harmony imposed by the rules of a convent. They are all so different from each other.
The choir falls silent. A solitary voice rises: ‘For I am surrounded by a pack of dogs…’
‘… A horde of evildoers assails me,’ the choir responds.
‘They pierce my hands and my feet…’ the voice continues.
‘… I can no longer count my bones.’
Antiphons and responses alternate; the poignant song of the soloist in dialogue with the sharper tones of the girls. Most of them learnt the art of song at the Beguinage’s school. Its choir is famous throughout Paris. Many gentlemen and merchant donors mention it in their wills, asking in return for prayers and vigils for the repose of their souls.
‘Deliver my soul from the sword, O God…’
‘… and my only one from the power of the dog.’
‘Save me from the lion’s mouth.’
‘…and my lowness from the horns of the unicorns.’
Humility… Ade’s brother thinks that as a widow she lacks it. She is already twenty-five years old. How many new husbands will she continue to refuse? He is impatient. Every sentence in his last letter was tense with this impatience. He does not understand her pain.
The man in front of her stirs heavily on his prie-dieu. The wood groans. He is fat, although still young, one of those merchants who spends all his time seated at tables handling either money or food. It was because of men like him that her husband died. Thrown onto the muddy ground and beaten like a swine.
Ade crosses her arms and clenches her fists against her belly.
‘Oh, fighters for the flower, born on a thornless branch, you are the voice of the world…’
The choir reprises the opening of the song. Their voices open up now, the singers’ throats are warmed up, liberated by the vibrant intonations that are born down in their bellies with each breath and rise to spill forth from their lips.
‘… encircling the regions of wandering souls…’
The syllables flow after each other, sketching broad, continuous spirals in the air above, overlapping, curling like vines around the columns of the chapel, rising ever higher.
But Ade’s body remains heavy, her soul bitter.
3
Aday and a night have passed, and all this time the little girl has lain curled up on her bed in the infirmary. Ysabel tried to undress her with the help of her assistant, Agnes. The child was sweating and feverish. The miasmas exuded by her damp rags would only further weaken her body. But she struggled, resisting Ysabel’s attempts with all the strength of her wiry frame.
We have been clumsy, the beguine reproaches herself. Too hasty. Sitting at the table in her kitchen, she breaks pieces of plane and willow bark into little fragments, throws them into a pot of water—two portions of willow for one of plane—adds a sprig of agrimony, before stirring the mixture and putting it on the fire. This is a sure remedy for fever. But for anger? For it is anger that troubles the girl just as much as fear.
Ysabel has asked for a curtain to be hung about the girl’s bed in the infirmary’s great hall, to calm and reassure her, and to reassure the other patients too. For the patients in the neighbouring beds have seen what the child was hiding under her hood. The band that held back her hair had come undone as she fought off any attempts to comfort her. Her hair had spilt out over her shoulders. A thick mass, fire-red.
In the hearth, Ysabel’s concoction quickly comes to the boil, turning a yellowish colour. The herbalist raises the rack and pinion, letting the liquid simmer while she thinks. A sovereign remedy against fever—but what against anger…? For it is indeed anger that troubles the girl, as much as fear…
Lifting the hem of her robe, she climbs the wooden stairs to the floor above. The door at the top of the staircase opens into a single room serving as both living and sleeping quarters. She has no fireplace, but the conduit from the chimney runs along the wall, bringing enough heat even in the cold spells to make the infirmary liveable.
Near the bed is a trunk of dark oak, with forged iron locks in the shape of stylized stems, the only possession Ysabel brought with her when she came here, a gift from her first husband. Ysabel raises the lid, and rummages beneath linen shirts and woollen tunics to pull out a stitch-worked case from the bottom of the chest. Inside is the jewellery she has not worn for years. But this is not what she is looking for. Her fingers feel among the rings and bracelets, until they recognize the angular hardness of the object they seek.
*
Outside it is even colder than it has been recently. The ground is slippery with ice, the sky frozen solid. The beguine examines the heavens for a moment. It will not snow; the temperature has dropped too low. The bailiffs will be gathering up new cadavers from the abandoned hovels and waste grounds of the city, unless the stray dogs find them first.
Like the herb and the vegetable gardens, the infirmary is situated between the south side of the chapel and the rampart, sheltered from the comings and goings of outsiders. It is flanked by a dozen two-storey dwellings, aligned in two rows, which are granted primarily to the older companion-sisters or to those who want more solitude to devote to prayer. Here, for convenience, is where Ysabel lives. On the other side of the chapel, which more or less splits the Beguinage in two, is the great courtyard around which are crowded most of the lodgings, including that of the mistress, and the communal hall where the youngest and the least well-off of the sisters are lodged.
As she skirts the long, low building where the sick are cared for, the old beguine imagines the look of worry on Agnes’s face. Despite her best efforts, rumours are starting to circulate in the dormitory, fears to spread, amplified by the weakness of sick bodies and spirits, by pain and sleepless nights.
Rufus, the redhead! The monks fling this insult at each other when they quarrel. Red, the cursed colour, the colour of the traitor. The red hair of Judas and Cain, of Esau who sold his inheritance to his brother for a plate of lentils, of Ganelon who sent Roland and his companions to be massacred. The colour of the flames of hell that burn without illuminating. Of Satan and his evil spells. Of children who are conceived during their mother’s menstruation. A few days ago, the abbot of Sainte-Genevieve expelled a girl from the town, her only sin that of being born with flaming red hair. But being cast out from her home with no resource but her young body would lead her to damnation more surely than the colour of her hair, thought Ysabel.
If red was so bad a colour, why had God put it on the flanks of the beautiful horses she once rode on the lands of her estate? And on the necks of the does that glow in the rays of the sun when they bend tenderly to their newborn fawns?
*
From the herbalist’s belt hangs a pouch that never leaves her side. Inside it is the gift for her young patient, a gourd full of the draught made from barks and flowers, and another flacon containing a thick wine mixed with a paste of poppy seeds. Only a few drops of the latter. But before the girl will accept the offered remedies, Ysabel must speak with her.
She pushes open the door of the dormitory. It is well-heated, a fire burns in the hearth, maintained by the young girls who assist Agnes. The straw mattresses are lined up either side of a central walkway, covered with white cotton sheets that have been bleached with soap and ashes. Fumigations of fennel and anise are performed several times a day and give the air an aniseed smell. Ysabel is satisfied. Of course the beguines’ infirmary is infinitely more modest than the Hotel-Dieu hospital, but it is well maintained.
Currently a dozen beds are occupied by elderly sisters and poor women from the neighbourhood. Many are suffering from the cold, and one is recovering with difficulty from childbirth. There is no husband and the infant has been given to a neighbour. The beguine hopes the mother will recover, but the poor woman has lost a lot of blood and will not eat.
Ysabel passes between the beds, glancing to either side, lingering a moment near old Cathau, whose condition has been worsening for several days. Her eyes are closed, but at least she has stopped moaning. Her breathing barely lifts the two blankets laid on top of her. Ysabel adjusts the cloth tied around her head, gazing tenderly at the face on which new hollows have been etched. Then walks on to meet Agnes, who suddenly appears from behind the curtain put up for the new arrival at the end of the dormitory.
‘She still hasn’t eaten anything,’ Agnes whispers.
‘Has she drunk a little water?’
‘She refuses everything we bring her.’
‘Leave a goblet at the foot of her bed and a plate of food so she can eat when she is alone.’
‘That is what I have done!’ Agnes’s expression stiffens. Her sour face is a renunciation. The deep lines at the corners of her mouth, the wrinkles and folds in her skin, all seem to pull her face down as if a hand wanted to wipe it clean of features. Only her pointed nose sticks out, and her dark, arched eyebrows.
‘Go and rest, Agnes,’ suggests Ysabel. ‘I will take care of her—and the others.’
*
The girl is still dressed in her soiled cape, the hood drawn down over her face. All that Ysabel can see of her are a sharp chin and a bony knee poking through her tattered breeches.
On the ground beside the cot, a bowl of soup has gone cold, the good chicken fat clotted in circles atop the golden broth.
Ysabel keeps still. She has noticed, from a small stiffening in her body, that the child is aware of her presence. She sits calmly at the foot of the bed and remains silent.
A ray of blurred light falls into the room through the oilcloth stretched across the window and onto the girl’s back and shoulders. Ysabel rests a hand lightly on the sheet. On the other side of the curtain around the bed one woman clears her throat. Another breaks into a coughing fit. Then silence falls again, disturbed only by the crackling of the wood in the fireplace. Little by little, from the slight movements of the sheet under her palm, Ysabel feels the girl relax.
She waits a little longer, then starts to tell a story.
‘As a child,’ she says, ‘I was unruly. A strong character. I liked nothing so much as galloping in the woods.’
On the bed, the girl stiffens again. The storyteller pauses, then carries on, her voice low and steady to begin with. She knows that the rhythm of her words—the force or softness she puts into them, the silences that she places between them—is just as important as their meaning.
‘My father’s estate was a few miles from Autun. We had meadows and forests, soil that grew wheat as high as you wished, hardy vines that hung heavy with grapes. At the end of every summer, I would ride my horse through the fields alongside my brothers. We would watch the ears ripen and yellow until our father gave the order for the harvest.’
The child is paying attention now. Ysabel can feel it. This attention must be the thread that guides her story.
‘And then I grew up. I was asked to stay in the house to learn what young girls should know. But spending my days sitting down, with my embroidery frame between my hands instead of the reins of my mare, made my blood boil. My vivacity turned to anger. I did not understand why I was being deprived of what I loved, the outdoors, the wind on my cheeks, the smell of my mount after the gallop.
‘This anger began to devour me. It was like a fire. My guts were twisted, my throat burned from spitting out angry words that should not be spoken, my head clamouring with thoughts that find no escape. Then one day, I slammed the door in the face of my governess and ran to get my horse from the stables. My older brother came after me and tore the reins from my hands, and—I don’t know what came over me, but I fought him.’
This time, the girl moves, imperceptibly, as if to come closer to the source of the voice. Her hood slips, revealing the curve of her chin.
‘My brother punished me. Hard. He struck me with his whip until my dress was torn, my skin bloody and bruised, and then I was locked in my room.’
Ysabel pauses again. With bated breath, she approaches the wild child lying on the straw mattress.
‘But that is only the beginning of the story. What is important comes later. One evening, while everybody in the house was asleep, my grandmother came secretly to my bedside. She spoke to me. She said that anger, the anger of the heart and the mouth, the anger of the limbs, would destroy the body and the soul. But since I was still a child who did not yet have the strength and wisdom to fight this, she would give me a present…’
Ysabel rises, slips her hand into her pouch, and places the stone in the sunlight beside the girl’s face. The carved crystal captures the light and tints it a pale blue, almost transparent.
‘This is an aquamarine, a drop from the sea. You have only to hold it in your hand and look at it for the anger to dissolve. It has often helped me. I give it to you for as long as you need it.’
4
The girl did not react right away. The ray of light slowly slid across the bed, playing with the angular facets of the aquamarine, bringing forth turquoise and green watery sparkles, which then faded into sudden opalescence. Then the light left the stone in shadow, where it lost brilliance but gained in depth, like the surface of the ocean when the sun goes behind a cloud.
Then her hand shot out of her sleeve and closed around the gift.
She has fine white skin, so fine and so white that one can see the blueish veins under it. This is not the skin of a vagabond or pauper.
On the other side of the hanging curtain, the old woman begins to cough again. Ysabel stands up carefully and beckons over one of the girls. She hands her the gourd containing the draught and tells her to give a gobletful to the cough-racked woman. She is going to have to make a tour of the dormitory and examine each patient in turn. But the one right here still needs her.
The beguine moves closer to the child, whose fingers are gripping the stone from the sea. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she says softly, ‘it’s me again. I did not tell you my name. It is Ysabel. And you don’t have to tell me your own. But since I gave you a gift, I would like you to give me one in return. I brought you a soothing drink. I am going to put it near you. Take three sips. This will do you good, as much as the stone.’
She puts the goblet of wine on the ground alongside the cold broth, and withdraws.
*
It takes the poppy some time to act. As long as it takes Ysabel to do her round of the infirmary. When she comes back to the redheaded girl, her limbs have relaxed and she is dozing.
Agnes gazes at her in relief.
‘We shall give her a bath,’ says Ysabel. ‘I will carry her. You can go to the steam room and heat the water.’
As her assistant goes away, Ysabel bends to take the child in her arms. She is still strong, her body muscled by the horseback riding of former times and now her work in the garden. But the child seems heavier than she thought. Taller, too. Until now, she has only seen her curled up.
In the room off the dormitory with the tub, the hearth glows red with embers and spreads a good heat. The old beguine lowers her onto a trunk placed against a wall and begins gently to undress her.
‘Don’t make the water too hot,’ she tells Agnes. ‘No warmer than the palm of your hand. We have to bring the fever down.’
First, she takes off the shoes, revealing small feet with swollen toes. Then the cape. Agnes’s gaze weighs on her as she runs her fingers through the grime-stiffened hair to untangle it.
Under the cape, the child wears a linen shift. Docilely she lets her arms be raised so Ysabel can lift it off.
She is not only bigger than the beguine imagined, but older too. Under the chemise she wears next to her skin can be seen the shape of high, round breasts. Those of a girl soon to become a woman, if she is not one already.
But their curves are not the only source of the beguine’s astonishment. Once again, the whiteness of the skin and its smoothness surprise her. And also the quality of the chemise, woven from a supple, light wool.
Behind her, Agnes empties the warm water from the fire into the tub.
‘Wait for me, child,’ whispers Ysabel to her patient, who lies back limply with eyes closed.
On some shelves set in a recess in the wall sit a number of varnished earthenware pots. Without hesitating, Ysabel picks up three in turn, plunges her hand inside and sprinkles handfuls of dry herbs and flower petals onto the warm water.
‘White rose to purify the passions, mugwort to chase away bad thoughts, sage to cure anything, the panacea of panaceas.’
This silent prayer accompanies each of her handfuls in turn. Not really a prayer, perhaps, but God alone knows what it is. Her grandmother Leonor did the same thing to strengthen the power of plants. No doubt she slipped in other words from her homeland of Berry too, but that was her secret.
Since she was a noble lady, nobody had dared to call Leonor a ‘healer’. Nor an apothecary, since she was only a woman. But everybody, from relatives to peasants, would ask for her help. When she visited a sick person, she needed only to examine the whites of their eyes, to press her fingers to their forehead and wrist, in order to know what imbalance they were suffering from and what concoctions to prescribe in order to re-establish the harmony of humours. She had taught Ysabel the remedies that took care of stomach troubles and fevers, those that purged or fought poison, the poultices that stopped bleeding, and herbs that relieved women of the pain of menstruation—and sometimes even of the burden of an infant. She had taught her the plants of God and those of the devil, about ferns capable of keeping evil spirits away and the strange plants containing the foam of elements with which Satan liked to meddle. In the fields and woods as they walked together, she had shown her the pulmonaria, whose leaves were spotted with white like the lungs to treat tubercular patients, chelidonium with yellow sap like bile that relieved liver troubles, nuts with kernels like lobes of the brain to treat sickness of the mind, and dragon’s arum, with skin like a serpent’s, which protected people from snakebite.
The Earth knows us better than we know ourselves, she used to say. She is benevolent and talkative. In each of Nature’s works there are a multitude of signs. You must learn to pay attention to them.
*
The white rose petals spread across the surface of the water in the tub. The room fills with fragrant steam. Ysabel turns to Agnes.
‘Add a little cold water, I pray you. Then you may go and take care of the other patients.’
The assistant raises her eyes in surprise.
‘Don’t worry,’ whispers Ysabel, ‘I know how to care for her.’
Agnes acquiesces with a slight nod of her head and, her task completed, departs with an abrupt swish of her grey robe.
Alone now, Ysabel tests the water temperature with her hand, then turns to the young woman, who has not moved all this time. She seems to have woken from her stupor, but she is still calm.
‘I am going to get you out of your chemise, my child. Then bathe you.’
She pulls the light wool over the girl’s head. She stands naked now, arms at her sides, the palms of her hands turned towards Ysabel, her head lowered.
White, yes, so very white. That creamy white of redheads. The body long and well-shaped, firm, the muscular thighs of a youth, narrow hips, the breasts are two delicate mounds on a delicate bust, the shoulders a little wide but delicate and responsive, as is the neck on which her face inclines. Splashes of freckles on her neck and arms. But other marks, too, larger, of dark blue tinged with red. On her ribs and lower back, and inside her thighs near her pubic hair.
Ysabel sighs, her heart tightening.
The girl has been raped.
She holds out her hand like a mother taking her child to the bath, helps her over the wooden edge of the tub, settles her down in the tepid water, then eases her back on the linen cloth that has been doubled over the wood to protect her skin from splinters. And until the hour of compline, she gently washes her with soap made from olive oil, kneads her hair, passes a clean cloth into the smallest crevices of the skin, between each finger and each toe, and finally into the intimate places, the most hidden, to cleanse them of all dirt and evil.
5
Ysabel’s first husband, Hugues, had been a faithful companion of Louis IX. He had joined him in 1248 on his disastrous Crusade, and it was only due to a fever that he had not taken part in the Battle of Fariskur in Egypt, when the king’s army, overcome with fatigue and devastated by dysentery, had been massacred by the Muslims; the king, to his great shame, had been taken prisoner. Louis became convinced he was being divinely punished.
Hugues had again accompanied the king in 1270 when for the second time Louis took up the pilgrim’s staff and the banner of Saint Denis, and led another Crusade as expiation after a great purification of the kingdom—Jews condemned to be broken on the wheel, and blasphemers, prostitutes, criminals and scoundrels implacably hunted down. Hugues was also near Louis when the king died at Carthage, calling in his faltering voice upon the help of the two saints to whom he was sworn, Jacques and Denis.
There followed a shameful quarrel over the corpse of the dead sovereign, a precious relic that would attract glory and protection to whoever possessed it. Charles of Anjou wanted to keep his brother’s body in his kingdom of Sicily rather than ceding it to his nephew Philip, the king’s son and successor. However, despite his youth, Philip the Fair won the right—once the body was treated against putrefaction—to conserve the noble and hard parts, the skeleton, whereas his uncle had to be content with the flesh and entrails in all their softness. The king’s chamberlains dismembered the cadaver of their master and cured it so long in a mixture of wine and water that the bones fell white and clean from the skin, so that there was no need to use force in the partition of the corpse.
Hugues had reported all these details to his wife—still so young. He also told her of the strange convoy that had crossed the Mediterranean, then all of Italy, over the Alps at Mont-Cenis to climb the valley of Maurienne, passing Lyon, Cluny, Châlons and Troyes, before the procession reached Paris. The small wooden coffin containing the remains of Louis IX was carried on the back of a horse. The corpse of his son Jean Tristan came behind him, followed in turn by the body of his chaplain, Pierre de Villebéon, who had also died during the voyage. Then a tragic stopover in Trapani added to the cortege the bier of Louis’s son-in-law Theobald II of Navarre and, finally, after a fifth and double bereavement, came the body of the new queen of France, Isabelle of Aragon, wife of Philip III, who had fallen from a horse when crossing a river in flood and died at the age of twenty-four after delivering a stillborn infant.
Hugues had not gone on to the end of the voyage. He had abandoned the cortege after Lyon to rejoin his wife at his Burgundian estate. Nor did he attend the funeral of the sovereign at Saint-Denis. Exhausted by battles and fevers, he left this world a few weeks after his return.
This first husband, with whom she had lived only four interrupted years amid long absences, Ysabel had deeply loved. She had been fifteen when they wed, he twenty years older, but he was as virile as a youth. And so he remained in her memory. After his death she had married a good man who gave her a son, Robin, and much affection, and with whom for seventeen years she had shared bed and table, but this part of her existence seems to have evaporated—not so much disappeared as snuffed out, like a dream that lost its colour upon your awakening. By contrast, the rare moments spent with Hugues came back to her, vivid and clear. Their rides. Their laughter. Her tears when he went away. And that gesture he’d made when he left, hand outstretched with open palm, like an offering and a promise. She saw it only last night in her dreams.
Maybe it is age that pushes me towards these old memories, she thinks as she leaves her house in the morning. She has noticed this at the bedsides of the sick, shortly before they die—the nearness of death seems to gather up time. But the particular atmosphere of the Beguinage and the memory that inhabited it, that of the king whom her husband had loved to the point of following him on the most dangerous paths of salvation, probably had something to do with it as well.
Some used to mock the sovereign for his ostentatious piety. After the humiliating defeat of the First Crusade, it is true, he was seen to take pleasure in a life of privation, abandoning ermine and furs, luxurious robes, golden chains and spurs, to dress sombrely, eat simple dishes, and dilute his wine with water. Today, though, all must admit that during his life Louis tried to approach, as much as possible for any man in his incompleteness, the example of Christ. He supported the mendicant orders, founded hospitals for the poor, and encouraged the aspirations of women who wanted to practise their religion without falling under the yoke of the ecclesiastical authorities. Under his protection, small communities of beguines were established all over the kingdom: in Senlis, Tours, Orleans, Rouen, Caen, Verneuil. And in the capital Louis personally invested in the construction of the Beguinage, modelled after Saint Elizabeth in Ghent which he had once visited.
