In the Presence of Evil

by Tania Bayard

  ‘You must not say unkind things about the doctor. He restored you to health.’

  ‘Your doctor did nothing more than bleed me. I would have had my health back sooner if my midwife had treated me. She knows as much as your doctor. Probably more.’

  ‘The midwife is only a woman.’

  With that, Christine left the kitchen and marched up to her study. She sat at her desk and seethed with anger. Her father had given her to understand that women were as capable as men, and she had always believed it. But when she thought of what had happened at the palace that morning, the doubts that had assailed her at the dinner table returned. Perhaps her mother was right to say she should stay at home with her cooking and sewing.

  A noise at the door startled her, and she looked up to find Marie standing there, watching her.

  ‘I didn’t go out with the others. I heard what you told grand’maman.’ She had such a troubled expression on her face, Christine regretted having brought home the news about the murder. But it was too late now.

  ‘What do you think, Marie?’ she asked. ‘Your grandmother wants me to do nothing but cook and sew. Do you agree?’

  ‘Not at all.’ She was only twelve, but she seemed very grown up.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘What would you do with all this?’ she asked, walking to the desk and gesturing toward the jumble of quills, inkhorns, knives, rulers, and sheets of parchment that covered it.

  Just then, Jean appeared in the doorway. ‘What are you two talking about? Something’s wrong. Tell me, too.’

  ‘Your grandmother wants me to stay home all the time? Would you like that?’ Christine asked.

  ‘I would. But you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Of course she wouldn’t,’ Marie said. ‘Papa taught her to be a scribe, and she likes that better than cooking and sewing. She’s good at it, and she shouldn’t give it up.’

  That’s just what Étienne would have said, Christine thought, and she remembered the encouragement she’d had from her husband, who’d taught her to be as fine a scribe as he was. He’d often worked in this room, which served as a study as well as their bedroom, and she still had some of his quills. She reached for one. It felt warm, as though he’d just put it down. She took an old scrap of parchment, dipped the quill into her inkhorn, and wrote in bold black letters, I, Christine, am an excellent scribe. Should I continue?

  Someone said, Certainly. It must have been Marie, or Jean. But she couldn’t be sure.

  When Christine went down to the kitchen for supper, she found Francesca standing at the table, holding the pieces of broken pitcher.

  ‘There is no need for you to go out and work, Cristina. Your brother is going to send money from Italy.’

  ‘When?’

  The children came thundering down the stairs and into the kitchen. Francesca put her finger to her lips. ‘We won’t discuss this now, Cristina. Especially in front of Lisabetta. She misses her father.’

  At the table, Thomas couldn’t sit still. He giggled and nudged his grandmother, bursting with something he couldn’t wait to tell. When Christine finally demanded to know what it was, Francesca reached into her sleeve and pulled out a rolled-up piece of parchment.

  ‘I got something to keep you safe, if you go to the palace again,’ she said as she handed it to her daughter.

  Thomas bounced up and down. ‘Open it, open it!’

  Christine unrolled the parchment and stared at it in disbelief. ‘Where did you get this, Mama?’

  ‘She went out in the snow!’ Thomas cried. ‘She told me all about it, and I kept the secret, didn’t I, Nonna?’

  ‘You did indeed,’ Francesca said.

  Christine said, ‘This is foolishness, Mama. Who gave it to you?’

  ‘A friend. There is evil around. The words will protect you.’

  ‘You can’t read, so how do you know?’

  ‘My friend who wrote it told me. Those are prayers.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘And they are written in the blood of a white dove. To make them more powerful.’

  Christine sighed. ‘You shouldn’t believe what people tell you. Your old crone might have written magic spells instead of prayers, and you wouldn’t know the difference.’

  Francesca stamped her foot. ‘She is not an old crone. She is my friend.’

  Christine waved the parchment in front of her mother’s eyes. ‘You’re taking a great risk with this, Mama. You could be accused of trying to conjure demons. I can’t believe you involved the children in something so absurd.’

  ‘Only Thomas,’ Francesca said.

  The boy was close to tears, and Christine put her arms around him. ‘It’s not your fault, Thomas,’ she said. The other children looked relieved; they hadn’t been let in on the secret.

  Christine looked closely at what she held in her hand and turned to her mother. ‘Where did you get this piece of parchment? It looks like something I had on my desk.’

  ‘I put it to good use. The prayers will keep you safe. You must wear them around your neck when you go out.’

  ‘I’ll do nothing of the sort!’

  ‘Then you must stay at home.’

  ‘You know I can’t do that!’ Christine thrust the piece of parchment back into her mother’s hand, marched up the stairs, and went to bed.

  SIX

  Women know less because instead of having a variety of experiences they stay at home, satisfied with running the household. The best way for a reasonable person to learn is by being exposed to and doing many different things.

  Christine de Pizan,

  Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, 1404–1405

  Shortly before his marriage to Alix de Clairy, the knight Hugues de Précy had received from the king a mansion near the Hôtel Saint-Pol. The house, originally owned by a wealthy nobleman, was now shabby and nearly empty. Hugues liked to gamble, and thus had little to spend on much-needed repairs or furnishings. It was to this melancholy place that Hugues had brought his bride from Picardy.

  In the early afternoon of the day she and Christine discovered the murdered man at the palace, Alix de Clairy sat alone in her bedroom, playing her harp. She had no idea where Hugues was, but that was not unusual; he was rarely at home. She knew that had he been there, he would have berated her for wearing a plain woolen shift, neglecting to put on her shoes, and letting her long auburn hair hang loose around her shoulders. Little about his young wife seemed to please Hugues de Précy.

  Silk cottes, velvet surcoats, and fur-lined mantles hung on rods next to the bed where Alix sat. Golden hairnets and starched linen headdresses reposed on a large wooden chest. Hugues hoped she would become one of Queen Isabeau’s ladies-in-waiting, and in spite of his straitened finances, he managed to buy expensive clothes for her to wear when she went to the palace. Alix detested those clothes. The long dresses made it difficult to walk and their high-belted waists bound her so tightly she could scarcely breathe, while the stiff headgear never stayed in place. Until she’d come to Paris, she’d rarely worn anything other than short, loose-fitting chemises, plain cottes, and simple kerchiefs. At the Hôtel Saint-Pol the air was dense with smoke from torches, candle wax, and open fireplaces; courtiers and servants alike spent their days perspiring in elaborate, cumbersome garments. She found life there suffocating.

  Alix de Clairy was the only child of a wealthy lord with extensive landholdings near the city of Amiens. Her mother had died when she was six, and she had been cared for by an old nursemaid who allowed her to roam the woods and meadows of her father’s estates and play with the children of the peasants who worked there. One day an itinerant musician visited her father’s manor house, and from that moment the little girl thought of nothing but music. She convinced her father to let the man stay and teach her to sing and play the harp. The old musician told her about the troubadours and trouvères who’d written the songs she learned. ‘Some of them were women,’ he said, and Alix longed to emulate them. Now, in a strange city wit
h a husband who neglected her, music was her only pleasure, a distraction from many troubled thoughts.

  Music provided no comfort on the day of the murder at the palace. When she thought of the man with a dagger through his heart, a shiver ran through her body. She laid her harp aside, went to the chest, lifted its lid, and searched inside. When she didn’t find what she was looking for, she let the heavy lid drop and stood holding back tears. She didn’t know where her husband was, when he would come home, or what she would say when he returned.

  She went to the window and looked out. She longed to walk the streets of Paris, talk to the shopkeepers, gossip with the women in the markets, learn about the city, perhaps even begin to feel at home there. But Hugues had forbidden her to go out alone. As it was, he would be very angry when he learned she’d left the palace unaccompanied. It would be useless to try to explain that she’d been so frightened she hadn’t realized she’d forgotten her cloak; she hadn’t even noticed how cold she was without it.

  She thought of the scribe, Christine, and she wondered whether she’d noticed she’d run away. She pictured the king, reacting with horror to the news of the murder, perhaps losing his reason again, and she imagined the queen trying in vain to comfort him. She liked the queen, who enjoyed listening to her music and was kind to her, and she longed to do something to ease her sorrow.

  Alix’s father had died shortly after her marriage, and now her only friend was her old nursemaid, Gillette. The woman had followed her to Paris, but Hugues wouldn’t allow her to come to his mansion. Alix knew she was staying with a cousin named Maude in a small house in another part of the city. Once she’d even secretly visited her there.

  Gillette had said she would give her something the queen could use to cure the king of his terrible malady. Remembering this, Alix dressed and left the house. She knew how angry Hugues would be, but she didn’t care. If there was something that would make the king well, she was determined to get it.

  SEVEN

  The second kind of avarice is robbery. That is when someone takes something from someone else and refuses to give it back, instead keeping it and hiding it because it pleases him. And if he is asked to give it up, he denies knowing about it and conceals it so no one can find it.

  From a book of moral and practical advice

  for a young wife, Paris, 1393

  The next morning, Marion sat at the trestle table in front of the fireplace at the Tiron brothel. It was too early for customers, and the other prostitutes were either out in the street or resting in the curtained-off rooms. The burning logs in the fireplace crackled and spit, the parchment over the windows rattled in the wind, and the canes of brambles scratched at the door, but Marion, lost in thought, heard none of it – until Agnes came in and climbed the ladder to the loft. Marion woke from her reverie and listened to the girl searching through her belongings. She knew she was looking for the sack that belonged to the barefoot man.

  Agnes came back down and swaggered up to her. ‘Who took it?’

  ‘It didn’t belong to you.’

  ‘That’s no business of yours. If you’ve got it, give it back.’

  ‘I don’t have it. The man you stole it from came here yesterday and took it.’

  ‘Liar.’ Agnes grabbed Marion’s hair and pulled her to her feet. Marion lashed out at her with her fists, but Agnes ducked and butted her in the stomach. Marion doubled over and fell, dragging Agnes down with her, and the two scuffled on the floor, kicking and clawing. The other prostitutes came out of their rooms and stood around urging them on, until a sergeant-at-arms from the palace, one of Agnes’s regular customers, strode into the brothel. He pulled Agnes to her feet. ‘What’s going on here?’

  ‘She stole my book.’

  ‘What would you be doing with a book?’ The man put an arm around Agnes. ‘I’ve had my fill of books,’ he said. ‘A man brought one to the palace yesterday and got himself murdered because of it.’

  A shiver of excitement went through the girls, and they all started asking questions: Who was the man? How did he die? Who killed him? What happened to the book? Delighted to have an audience, the man released Agnes and sat on the bench. ‘No one knows who he was. He was dressed like a monk, but he can’t have been in his right mind. He wasn’t wearing shoes.’

  Marion and Agnes looked at each other.

  ‘Someone stabbed him through the heart, stuffed him behind a chest, and ran off with the book. A woman who writes for the queen found him. Hugues de Précy’s new wife was with her.’ The sergeant looked at Agnes. ‘She’s a sweet bit of ass, I can tell you.’

  ‘I know all about Hugues’s new wife,’ Agnes sniffed. ‘She may be sweet in bed, but that doesn’t stop Hugues from abusing her.’

  ‘What’s in the book?’ Marion asked.

  All the sergeant could say was that the Duke of Orléans was in a rage because it had been stolen.

  What if he had come here and found us with it? Marion asked herself. The Duke of Orléans was no stranger to the brothel. She felt sick. While the other girls crowded around the man, asking endless questions, she snuck out and went home.

  Marion shared a room with several other prostitutes in another section of the city, near the place where the rue Saint-Honoré crossed a street known as the rue de l’Arbre-Sec because of a wooden gallows standing there. When she arrived at her lodging house that day, she found her landlord, a strange little man with a black beard who owned several such buildings, standing in the street. He was dressed, as he always was, in a black cape with a long black hood and an ermine collar. He looked so dark and forbidding, she was glad she didn’t have to encounter him often. Nevertheless, she had to admit knowing him could be to her benefit. She’d heard he had ways of freeing prostitutes from prison when they were arrested for wearing jewelry or furs.

  The man had come to collect the rent, and Marion expected she would pay what she owed and be done with him. But he didn’t leave. ‘What happened to your face?’ he asked.

  She touched her cheek, and when she took her fingers away, she saw blood. She bowed her head to avoid his gaze, but he put his hand under her chin and lifted it up, forcing her to look at him.

  ‘You’ve been in a fight.’

  ‘One of the girls at the brothel stole a book. The man it belonged to came and got it, but she didn’t believe that. She thought I had it.’ She remembered how the man had raced around the brothel in a frenzy, and she saw again his red-rimmed eyes and his bare feet. She shuddered.

  Her landlord stared at her for a long time, and then he said, ‘You are fortunate that book is no longer at the brothel. If it ever crosses your path again, have nothing to do with it.’ He turned and left her.

  She went to her room and lay on her bed, trying to forget about the book and the man with the bare feet. After a while, she got up, washed the blood from her face, put on a clean cotte and a warm cloak, picked up an embroidered purse, and walked toward the market at the junction of the rue Saint-Honoré and the rue de l’Arbre-Sec. She knew there was a corpse swinging on a gallows there, and she didn’t really want to see it, but she was friends with the woman who sold honey wafers at that spot, and she was hungry.

  EIGHT

  In the name of God, you women who profess Christianity and yet pervert it with such vile conduct, get up out of the filth and save your poor souls. God is merciful; He will receive you if you sincerely repent.

  Christine de Pizan,

  Le Livre des Trois Vertus, 1405

  That same morning, Christine stood in the street in front of her house, wondering how best to calm her anger at her mother, who didn’t seem to understand how necessary it was for her daughter to go out and work, no matter where that took her. Worries about money made Christine ill-tempered and impatient, and she needed to think about something else. It was a warm day and the snow had melted, so she decided to walk to the Place de Grève and watch the wine boats dock at the open space beside the Seine. Surely it would be a pleasant distraction.

/>   She was wrong. Throngs of people headed in that direction – housewives with baskets of carrots and turnips slung over their arms, peddlers bearing sacks of crockery on their backs, peasants driving mules overburdened with panniers of pots, pans, and old clothes, kitchen boys toting bundles of faggots, bakers’ boys dropping the pastries they were supposed to be delivering, university students, clerks, monks – all had forgotten the errands that had brought them out: they were rushing to see an execution. She stepped into a doorway as a nobleman charged through the crowd on a black stallion, spattering everyone with mud and knocking an old woman carrying a basket of laundry to the ground. The woman lay sprawled at Christine’s feet, surrounded by her freshly washed shirts, aprons, and underclothes. ‘May a canker rot you!’ she screeched at the departing horseman’s back. ‘I hope that nag throws you into a pile of turds!’

  Christine helped her up, retrieved her basket, and stuffed her mud-stained laundry into it. The woman brushed herself off, swearing all the while at the brown slush clinging to her cloak, then grabbed Christine’s arm and tried to drag her along to the Grève. ‘Hurry, or you’ll miss the beheading,’ she cried. Christine pulled free and watched her scurry away. She was tempted to call after her that she would do better to go and rewash her clothes. She’d never found executions in public places entertaining. That day, the thought of them was unbearable.

  To escape the bloodthirsty crowd, she walked on the street where the glassmakers worked, slipping into the garbage-filled gutter in the center of the crowded street as she dodged the signs jutting out from the glass painters’ and enamellers’ shops. The contents of a chamber pot emptied from an upper window just missed her head, whereupon an old man standing in a doorway laughed and spat at her feet.

  She crossed the rue Saint-Martin and went down the rue des Lombards, in the shadows of the tall buildings where Italian bankers had their counting houses. Some snow remained in the dark, narrow alleyways separating the houses, and a group of small boys played there, laughing and throwing snowballs at passersby. A group of bankers wearing elaborately shaped green, red, and brown chaperons swore at them as they hurried by. Christine followed them, listening to their conversation and thinking about the life she could have had in Italy, if her family had remained there. Her mother would have been happy, her father would have been a professor at the university in Bologna, and she might have been allowed to go to school. But then she remembered – if she hadn’t come to France, she wouldn’t have met Étienne.