Free Muse by Mary Novik Page B

her travail, knowing the agony she had gone through. I helped her climb into the barrel, soaped her, and poured rinse water over her. Then I took her back to our cell and made sure no one came near since her flesh was frail and her thinking unstable.
    In the following days, her disquiet grew. She was sure that the wart on her finger was getting larger. Although I doused it with eau-de-vie to stop the oozing, two more warts sprang up and soon an army marched across her knuckles, broadcasting her guilt to the whole abbey, or so she believed. Elisabeth was attending all the hours to chant the Latin psalms almost word for word. Even more unsettling, she was haunting the church at other times, saying prayers tearfully for her dead. Why had I ordered her to do penance? Now she could not be stopped, and the nuns might guess the reason.
    Lent, with its rigour and deprivation, was a blow to our appetites.By the second week, the nuns squabbled over what they might and might not eat. I was drawn in, and heard myself argue the merits of almonds over walnuts, for I was fasting for the first time and crossing off the days until Easter.
    As the weeks passed, the chapter meetings became unruly, stirred up by papal letters warning against sorcery and malfeasance, for Pope John feared an attempt upon his life, a fate the abbess welcomed. Ever since her brother, the Knight Templar, had been despoilt and hounded, she had hated the French popes. On Palm Sunday, she reported, the Pope preached a sermon in Notre-Dame-des-Doms denying that the souls of the just saw God face to face, as former popes had promised. The Pope stood accused of heresy for this assault on the Beatific Vision and the abbess was not sorry for it. Such large transgressions had made her more attentive to the souls in her own keeping. Her eyes fell upon Elisabeth—her newfound piety, her surprising knowledge of the Latin psalms—and she announced that Elisabeth would be allowed to become a choir nun, as she had wished, instead of a lay nun.
    Overnight, Elisabeth’s warts became enflamed. I was awake all night contriving remedies to treat her hand. Nothing—neither a hot poultice nor cool salve—would calm the itching. When the sun rose, I went into the pasture to pick Saint John’s wort to soothe the warts. I had no sooner cut a few stems than the stockbreeder called out to me.
    “Is your knife sharp?”
    At my nod, she hastened me to the cow-shelter, where Emmanuelle was struggling to give birth. “She will be calmer with you. Hold her head and talk to her while I try to get the calf out.”
    I had assisted many times, but today my heart was uneasy. I did not wish to attend another difficult birth, and was shaky and out of sorts from lack of food and sleep. When Emmanuelle could not deliver on her own, we had to push her onto her side and tug out the calf by ropes tied to his ankles. As Emmanuelle licked him dry, I saw he was not brown like our herd, but white with black spots. I did not need to count them toknow that there were seven. The stockbreeder gave Emmanuelle a pail of mash and measured a length of twine. Because the newborn was a bull-calf, she would castrate him so he would fatten quickly.
    “Get your knife ready,” she said. “Your hands are steadier than mine.”
    The stockbreeder tied a lace knot around the scrotum to lessen the bleeding, then held the calf’s legs apart while I went in swiftly. I cut cleanly with my knife and dropped the severed testicles on the straw, feeling unhappy about my part in it. Now that the calf was up, the stockbreeder was counting his spots, and I regretted telling her about my prediction. I shaded my eyes from the sun as I hurried through the ploughed field. I was not fast enough, for she spurted past me. Her skirts caught on a deep furrow, she stumbled, dropped to her knees, raised her arms, fell again, her shouts getting louder as she approached the abbey, the calf draped over her arms with its afterbirth dripping