Cities of Women by Kathleen B. Jones

Author:Kathleen B. Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company

Several weeks passed before Monsieur Henri brought the first sections of the Book of Hours to Monsieur Bonhomme. It was the day I’d longed for—when we’d deliver the scribes’ pages to the artists who would paint puzzle initials, illuminate miniatures, and decorate borders around the handwritten text. My whole body tingled when I heard the bell ring in the atelier. The buzz of the men’s conversation reached my attic chamber. I grabbed my shawl, a pencil, and my sketchbook and ran downstairs to wait outside to take the short walk across the Petit-Pont to the quartier on the Left Bank, where the ateliers of the most famous enlumineurs were housed. Today, Monsieur Bonhomme had promised I’d witness one of the master illuminators transform the manuscript into an object of multidimensional delight.

The air was warm with summer and sweet with the smell of jasmine climbing a trellis on a nearby wall. The sky was awash in a dazzling color of blue, without even the tiniest wisp of a cloud whooshing across it. It was an unblemished blue that should have filled me with joy, but surprised me with a jolt of sorrow as an uninvited thought pierced my brain—blue had been the color of my mother’s eyes and might have been the color of my daughter’s eyes, had she lived. Suddenly, in the cerulean firmament, a parade of ghostly memories and images of what might have been took shape, despoiling my vision with taunting reminders of everyone and everything fate had pulled from my life in its ever-widening gyre. How I might have loved that child, taught her to dream and to illuminate those dreams, as Gilles and Héloïse had taught me. How Mother and Father might have loved her, as they had loved me. How my twin sisters might have intrigued her with games. Mocked by this heavenly blue evocation of death’s capricious appearance in life, I returned to my attic chamber and wept.

When he did not find me outside, Monsieur Bonhomme sent the servant girl to fetch me. Feigning illness, I asked her to beg forgiveness for my absence, and turned toward the wall, hoping sleep would ease my grief. A little later came a knock on my door. With a worried look on his face, Monsieur Bonhomme entered the room, setting a tray of bread, cheese, and mulled wine on the table beside me.

“I’ve sent Monsieur Henri along with the quires to the illuminator’s atelier with instructions to begin only the simplest borders. We will observe the more elaborate miniatures being painted when you are well,” he said.

“I’m sorry to have caused a delay in the manuscript’s completion,” I said.

“The king will be untroubled by the change of timing. Even an infant daughter of royalty cannot yet read.” He forced a smile to cover his concern.

At the mention of the king’s daughter, my eyes welled again with tears.

“What saddens you, Anastasia?” His smile disappeared into a frown.

I hesitated to speak of the source of my grief, or admit to being overwhelmed by its mad force in a moment of immeasurable beauty.

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