Free Muse by Mary Novik Page A

on my sobs, too affrighted to look closer.
    Elisabeth curled on the floor, moaning. Her eyes closed, she was spared the pain of seeing her stillborn infant cupped in my blood-streaked hands. Before she could look, I swaddled the fœtus and shoved it out of sight behind me.
    I choked out some words to comfort her and calm myself. “You have lost your child. It is quiet and at peace.”
    The nocturn bells began to toll, mourning our loss. I had to think what to do. The afterbirth had been expelled cleanly, instead of staying inside to poison her. I suspected she had done more than climb over night fences to rid herself of this burden. Perhaps she had swallowed some ridding potion that had savaged her. I took her hands in mine to say the Latin of the absolution. Her mind was shaken, but her whimpering told me she had heard.
    “I have been your confessor, Elisabeth. You will do three times forty days of penance. You will go faithfully to all the hours. Above all, you will remain silent. No one need know what has happened. Listen to me!” Her shoulders, when I put my arms around them, were wet with perspiration. “Your maidenhead is gone, but you may still be celibate. You must learn to read and write, and you must obey the abbess in everything.”
    I hugged her tenderly. In me was a sadness, for this stillbirth had driven her where I could not follow. “These are now yours,” I said, twisting my paternoster beads around her wrist to hide the welts. “You will be a good novice and then a good nun, and you will forget the sad outcome of this night. I want your solemn promise.”
    “Yes, yes, I will,” she said, as the agates dragged down her arm.
    It was a honeyed lie, given as sleep claimed her, but this promise was all she had to give. I accepted it from her, the only sister I would ever have, knowing that even a lie could guide a life aright. I held her until she stopped shuddering, then sponged the blood from her legs and drew her blanket over her.
    I was ill to my stomach waiting for nocturns to end, rocking back and forth as uncontrollably as if I had given birth myself. At last, I heard the nuns mounting the stairs to return to sleep and took grim courage for the task ahead. I could now carry the tiny corpse through the tumbled ashlar in the chapel. Outside, I would dig a grave with my bare hands so no one would hear the scrape of the spade or its bitter clang as it hit rock. The softest earth was in the abbey’s churchyard, but only hallowed corpses rested there, after their souls had been saved.
    Had this infant been ensouled? I lifted the swaddled fœtus into my lap and touched it tentatively. It felt older than the forty days at which the soul entered a male child. If male, it had died without being baptised and would be eternally damned. But what if it was female? The soul would not arrive until the eightieth day. My tears had fallen on the bloody swaddling, moistening it enough for me to peel it from the tiny corpse. It was a girl, perfectly formed, with every limb exactly as it should be, as much a part of me as of Elisabeth, yet none of her looked fully human. I had seen animals born before time, but never had such fierce grief assailed me. She was the size of my trembling hand—certainly older than eighty days, a fœtus animatus. Even now, a soul was fluttering inside her, an anima preparing to take flight. I gathered the bundle to my heart to baptise her myself, saying every word of Latin I could remember from the liturgy—one wild, unstoppable, crazed word after another. Then I lifted my eyes to witness her soul’s escape. After I had swaddled her in clean linen, I cradled her in my arms and carried her outside, beneath the cypresses, to give her a home in the soft earth of the hallowed graveyard.

Twelve
    A T DUSK THE FOLLOWING DAY , Ash Wednesday, I took Elisabeth through the silent darkness to the bathhouse after the nuns had bathed. When she undressed and I saw her still-swollen belly, I ached for