We all went to church together, laughing. I knew I was leaving Juan and Fiore and Miles to flounder, but I make friends easily, and I liked these men.
We heard compline sung in the Italian manner. Italian Latin is virtually incomprehensible to an Englishman and so I translated for Miles Stapleton, who gazed at the altar with pious devotion.
After church, we gathered around Father Pierre, and he and Ser Niccolò embraced. Then the Florentine lord departed, inviting all of us to dine at his house the next day.
I was up early the next morning. By then, I had discovered that Father Pierre was in Bologna to arrange grants and loans in aid of the Crusade and because he had a writ from the Pope to establish a chair of Theology at the university, which would, of course, greatly enhance the prestige of Bologna. But it meant that for the next three days he would be sitting with six other great prelates in examination of two candidates for the honour of a Doctorate in Theology.
The world is more complex than we often imagine. That the good men and women of Bologna were being pressed to provide funds for the crusade was true, but the Pope, and Father Pierre, who loved the Bolognese and had made many friends at the university, were providing value for money, a chair of theology would bring students from all over Italy and even all over Europe, and Father Pierre, himself one of the most famous theologians since Aquinas, would add enormous lustre to the founding.
At any rate, I had days to pass, and I had decided to apply myself to my new life. I curried Fra Peter’s charger and emerged from the university’s stable yard to find Sister Marie with her mule’s reins in her fist.
She grinned at me. ‘I’m told I have your intercession to thank for a new saddle,’ she said. That was more words than I had heard from her altogether. She spoke in French, and her French had a very odd accent, which I couldn’t place.
I bowed. On the road here I had decided that she was older than I had first thought, perhaps as old as forty. She had an upright carriage like a warrior and her eyes met mine with a frankness that was rare in women, even nuns. She never looked down. ‘Ma soeur, you owe your saddle only to the generosity of Ser Niccolò Acciaouli.’
She looked at me for perhaps twenty or thirty heartbeats. ‘Are you bound there now?’ she asked. ‘To the saddlers?’
‘Yes, ma soeur. I could take your mule.’ I noted that she held her left shoulder stiffly and I guessed her arm still hurt.
She shook her head. ‘I will be happy of your company,’ she said, ‘but I can manage my own animal. And have, the last thousand leagues.’
I nodded. ‘Fra Peter said you had many miles in that saddle.’ I wanted to convey that I respected her accomplishment. She lived in the world of men, which was no easy task. Janet had given me a taste of how hard that could be. ‘Have you made many pilgrimages?’ I asked, as that seemed the safest answer to why a woman would have travelled so far as to wear a mule saddle to the point of failure.
‘I have made a few pilgrimages,’ she said, and lead the way out of the yard.
I gathered I’d somehow mis-stepped. I elected to remain silent, but that only lasted through three crowded morning streets. A pair of carters abused her; she was a horse length ahead of me, and they yelled in their countryside dialect that she should stop fucking the Pope and move.
Just as I reached the offending peasant, she turned and smiled at him. ‘The Peace of Christ to you,’ she said.
The man fell back a step.
To me, she said, ‘I fight my own fights, Englishman.’
We walked on. Eventually, because she didn’t really know Bologna, I had to pass her. ‘Don’t I at least deserve the Peace of Christ?’ I asked. ‘The saddlers are this way.’