“Name yourself,” I told her, smiling. “Name yourself, because I don’t think anyone here believes you’re the Mother of God.”
“He is Guy LeMerle, he’s a theater actor and a—”
“I said name yourself!” Once more, Isabelle’s hand began to creep toward the brazier. “In the name of the Father!”
“He’s doing this for revenge—”
“In the name of the Son!”
“Against the Bishop of Évreux!”
“In the name of the—” She was going to do it; her hand was an inch from the coals; her long sleeve had begun to smoke—
“The bishop, his father!”
That was such an unexpected blow that I actually staggered. All around me the sisters had frozen; Isabelle was staring at me; the bishop’s face was cheesy with shock. The liveried guards were beginning once more to push through the crowd, swords loosened at their belts. And still my Ailée went on. “Admit it, LeMerle,” she cried. “Isn’t he? Isn’t he?”
My God, I thought, she’s good. Wasted on these tame things, she should be setting stages alight in Paris theaters. I gave her a little bow to acknowledge it, then I turned to the bishop, who was watching me with a look of sick horror. “Well, Father,” I said, smiling. “Aren’t you?”
The storm was almost over our heads now. Through the gaps in the roof I could watch its approach, hell’s black circus striding across the flats. Below me the candles grew suddenly dim as a cold gust rushed in from beneath the doors. A sound arose from the crowd below, a throbbing like that of a rotten tooth. Eyes flicked from bishop to priest, from Virgin to bishop. My ankle began to wobble with the strain of standing still for so long, and I shifted slightly to ease it.
“Well?” said LeMerle, almost caressingly. “Aren’t you?”
There was a pause. Now I could see how cleverly LeMerle had used my intervention; if the bishop denied the Virgin’s accusation, then he validated LeMerle’s imposture and Isabelle would light the fuse. If he admitted it, he was publicly disgraced in front of the archbishop, his retinue, and the entire abbeyful of nuns. But there was one detail LeMerle had forgotten; though I was not yet sure how—or if—I could turn it to my advantage. At the side door, almost invisible in the smoke from the brazier, stood Soeur Antoine, head lowered like a bull about to charge.
I suppose I should be grateful, my Juliette. How you knew, I cannot guess—witchcraft, perhaps. But what a way to force him into a confession! My own plan was more dramatic, perhaps—I always enjoy a fire, you know—but I should have guessed you’d try to protect these poor sheep you call your sisters. Well, my dear, have it your own way. Let them keep their lives—if you can call it life. In either case, justice is done.
“Well, Father?”
Arnault gives a single nod.
Ahhh. The sound is like a tower of cards falling.
It’s a lie,” said Isabelle.
“No, my dear. It’s the truth.” LeMerle was watching the bishop; with a sudden movement he opened his priest’s robe and let it drop to the ground. A cry went up from the sisters; underneath the discarded robe he was dressed for travel, booted and spurred, with a leather vest leaving bare his branded left arm. It was the Blackbird of the old days who stood now smiling before the assembly, and as if to complete the tableau, lightning chose that moment to crack its bright whip across the sky, framing him in a sudden blaze of white.
The moan from the crowd had reached a pitch that I could barely tolerate, dragging at my heels like undertow. For a second I looked directly below me, and the world gave a sudden lurch. I felt the beginning of a tremor in my left leg, a tiny ticking of the calf muscle which, if left unchecked, would jerk the rope from under me into the kicking air.
I understood that this was precisely what LeMerle was waiting for; that the apparent recklessness of this unveiling had been as coolly calculated as the rest of his plan. One against sixty was odds even he might have hesitated to play; but if I were to fall…
Once more I shifted, uncomfortably aware of the slackness of the rope and of their white coiffes below me, waiting like gulls on a sea of eyes.
Ten more seconds and she will fall. Ten seconds more, eyes fixed on the white figure in the air. The diversion should be enough—the moment of flight, the broken shape on the marble—moment enough for me to find my exit. If not that, then to grab a weapon. Any of these sisters might buy my escape, but I would prefer Isabelle as hostage. A sword, a horse, and hotfoot across to the mainland. I’ll maybe leave the chit’s body in a ditch for him to find, or better still keep her with me. I could find uses enough for her where I’m going, and every day I’d fix in her flesh the barbs of my revenge. Not for myself—no, not this time. But for her, for Juliette, my sweet deceiver.
That I should live to see the day when I wished my Ailée to fall! He’ll pay for that too, you’ll see, in full coin. The congregation has become a chorus. The note—the long-drawn-out vowel of their despair—rises, swoops, soars again. Some weep in confusion, some tear their faces. But all eyes are on us both now, I watching her, she watching me. A turn of the friendly card—jack below, queen above—and our roles can be reversed once more. Even the guards remain frozen, swords half-drawn, awaiting an order that never comes.
I know what you’re doing, LeMerle. You’re waiting for me to fall. Buying time. I can feel you willing me, wishing me to slip, to stumble, the rope arcing into empty air without me, the long slice of darkness to the ground. I can feel your thoughts pressing against me. I am drenched with the rain now as water spurts from the gutter into the tower. The bell, barely three feet above me, spatters its note in a thousand droplets of sound. I will not—will not fall. But the gulf beneath draws me, and my cramping muscles scream for respite. I feel as if I have been here motionless for hours.
The rope jerks again in response to some involuntary spasm. The keening of my sisters makes me dizzy. And yet I will not—
—must—
—not—
—fall—
I see it happen with a dreamlike clarity. A series of tableaux, each fixed by the lightning as it strikes nearby—several times, in rapid succession. She slips, kicks out against the swing of the rope, and loses it—for an instant I see her arms flung wide, embracing the dark. Strike. Thunder, louder than ever before, so close overhead that for a moment I almost believe the strike has hit the tower itself…And in the brief interval of darkness that follows, I hear the rope give way.
I know I should run now, while their attention is elsewhere. But I cannot; I have to see for myself. Soeur Antoine is guarding the door; there is a dangerous expression on her face, but she is surely too slow to hinder me. As I glance at her, she begins to move toward me; her face is set in stone, and now I remember the strength in her big red arms, the size of her meaty fists. Nevertheless, she is only a woman. Even if she has turned against me now, what can she do?
The sisters crowd round, no doubt to see the body on the floor. At any moment there will come the cries, the confusion; and in that confusion I will make my escape. Soeur Virginie is looking at me, her small fists clenched; beside her, Soeur Tomasine’s eyes are narrowed into crescents. I step forward once again, and the nuns cluck like frightened hens, too stupid even to move aside. My sudden fear is absurd, I know. Ridiculous, to think that they might try to stop me: you might as well expect barnyard geese to attack the fox.
But something has gone wrong; the eyes that should have been gazing at the body on the floor are turning instead toward me. Even geese, I recall from my abbey days, can be savage when driven. And now they dare to block my way, to peck at me, to surround me with their stink and their reproaches…As I push forward into the space, Soeur Antoine raises a fist, which I could deflect with my arms behind my back, but already I am felled with astonishment, stumbling even before her blow lands. What witchcraft is this? I drop to my knees, my head ringing from a vicious punch to the back of the neck, but all I feel is a remote and silent amazement.
There i
s no body on the floor.
Strike.
And the tower is empty.
56
SEPTEMBER 7TH, 1611
THÉTRE AMBULANT DU
GROSJEAN CARÊMES
Some memories never fade. Even in the warmth of this good autumn, this good town, some part of me remains there, at the abbey, in the rain. Perhaps some part of me died there—died, or was reborn, I am not sure which. In any case I, who did not believe in miracles, witnessed something that changed me—only a little, but forever. Maybe, in that moment, Sainte Marie-de-la-mer was with us, sitting here now, a twelvemonth later. I can almost believe even that.
I felt the rope go. A muscular spasm, perhaps, or the slackness of the cord, or the rotten wood of the scaffolding as it gave way. I knew a moment of utter calm, frozen in the lightning flash like a fly in amber. Then reaching for nothing in a last gesture of desperation, my mind a blank but for the thought—if only I were a bird—my fingers splayed but finding nothing, nothing.
And then there was something in front of my face—a cobweb, a figment, a rope. I did not question its miraculous presence; falling, it was almost out of my hands before I had the wit to catch it. I missed it altogether with the right hand, but my reflexes were still good and I caught fast with the left, dangling for a second in midair with nothing in my mind but stupid disbelief—then I saw a pale face, twisted now in an urgent grimace as she mouthed at me from the hole in the roof, and I understood.
Perette had not failed me. She must have climbed up the scaffolding left by the workmen and watched everything through the gaps in the slate. I hoisted myself up—the ability to climb a rope, like that of balancing upon a line, is not easily lost—and dragged myself like a wet fish onto the slippery roof.
I lay there for a while, exhausted, whilst Perette embraced me, hooting with joy. Below us I could hear a surge of sound, incomprehensible as the tides. I think I lost consciousness; for a moment I drifted, washed by the rain, the smell of the sea in my nostrils. I would never fly again. I knew it; this had been l’Ailée’s final appearance.
But now Perette put out her small hand and shook me urgently. I opened my eyes; saw her sketch one of her quick hand-mimes. A horse; the sign for “haste”; the gesture she had always used to indicate Fleur. And again Fleur; riding; haste. I sat up, my head swimming. The wild girl was right; whatever the outcome of LeMerle’s drama, it would not be wise to remain. Soeur Auguste too had given her final performance, and I found that, after all, I did not regret it.
Perette took my hand, guiding me deftly toward the ladder, still in place some fifteen feet down the steep slope below us. She seemed quite unafraid of the danger but climbed with catlike ease, balancing delicately upon a ridge of broken guttering as she moved to let me pass. Rain stung our faces and hammered on our heads; thunder rolled over us like rocks; a lightning-struck tree was ablaze a hundred yards away, touching everything with a dim, apocalyptic light. And in the middle of it all we laughed, Perette and I, like mad things; laughed with the sheer joy of the rain and the storm; at the relief of my escape, and most of all, at the look on his face, the look on LeMerle’s face as he prepared to receive the pounding of his life from a gaggle of angry nuns…
I heard later that he went without a fight and with only a token protestation of innocence, still gazing in puzzlement at the place where I had been. It was as if the ground had been cut from under him, I heard, his words losing their witchcraft in the face of this new, greater sorcery. Certainly it must have seemed to them as if I disappeared into thin air. A miracle, came the cry, a miracle, and surely this floating lady was indeed Sainte Marie-de-la-mer, come to rescue her own, as in the old legends.
The discovery of a lightning-struck tree not a hundred yards from the church also sparked rumors of miraculous delivery. I hear that today there is a small shrine to the Holy Mother of the Sea, that the new Marie has returned to the mainland, and that a new Mermaid, so like the old one as to be almost identical, has reappeared in the abbey church. Already she is said to have healing powers, and pilgrims come from as far as Paris to see the place where she appeared to more than sixty witnesses.
The Bishop of Évreux was quick to corroborate the Apparition’s tale, revealing LeMerle as an impostor in a catalog of deceit and corruption. The miraculous appearance of the fleur-de-lis, emblem of the Holy Virgin, on the arm of the accused man was interpreted as definitive proof of the Apparition’s authenticity and of his own alliance with dark powers, and he was taken, dazed and unprotesting, into the custody of the secular court.
I cannot help but grieve a little. I have hated him in the past, but since then I think I came to know him better, and if not to forgive, at least to understand. He was taken to the mainland, I heard, to be examined by the judge in Rennes. I was in Rennes myself for a time, and saw the roundhouse in which he was being kept, and read the notices upon its doors telling of his arrest. These announced his forthcoming execution—I thought I detected the vindictive hand of the bishop in some of the details, which rivaled the execution of Ravillac, the king’s murderer, in their ingeniousness and brutality.
The bishop and his niece returned to Montauban, the ancestral home of the Arnaults. Apparently Isabelle had expressed the wish for a simpler life, far from the coast, and had joined a reflective order—this time as an ordinary sister, where, I hope, she learned to live in peace and forgetfulness.
The bishop himself fared less well. Though he protested that his false confession in our chapel had been extracted by fear, he never quite recovered from its effects. Rumors of his cowardice spread insidiously; open doors were softly closed; friendships withdrawn, ambitions quashed. I have heard reports that he too is planning to retire—ostensibly on the grounds of ill health—to the same monastery of which his late brother was abbot.
As for myself, I left the abbey that day. I could not stay and risk arrest—besides, too much had passed in that place for it to be a home for me again. So I left, taking with me LeMerle’s fine horse as well as the money and provisions I found in its saddlebags.
I found Fleur waiting for me in our agreed place, the orphan look gone from her face—had it ever even been there?—and we fled across the causeway, chased all the way by the tide, arriving at Pornic three hours later.
I do not imagine they looked for me very far. The bishop already had his man, and it would not have benefited him to blazon his Isabelle’s disgrace any further. I think he let me lose myself rather than face the story I might tell, and in any case I had the tide between us and the island, with an eleven-hour wait for the next safe passage across the strand.
Traveling with LeMerle had taught me to value caution. I sold his horse as I had Giordano’s mule so long ago, and with the proceeds bought myself a caravan and a mule to pull it. We lived well from our gold, Fleur and I, stopping for supplies in market towns but keeping to the smaller roads at other times for fear of the bishop’s men. Close by Perpignan we fell in with a group of gypsies who, when they heard my tale, welcomed us as their own. We had been traveling with them for almost three months until we met an Italian theater troupe who agreed to take us both.
Since then, we have toured provincial towns all over the district. The commedia dell’ arte begins to gain in popularity as the Italianate fashions return, and masked, I need have no fear of being recognized as the Winged One of old. We are happy, Fleur and I, with our new friends: Fiorillo who plays Scaramouche, and Domenico, who plays Arlequin. Fleur plays the drum and dances, and I play piety once more with Isabelle. That I should be given that part—that name—always fills me with a kind of laughter so close to tears that sometimes I can hardly tell them apart. The mask hides my smiles—and the rest—and Beltrame, who leads the troupe, tells me he has never seen such a spirited Isabelle.
And yet there are times—many times this past winter—when I ask myself whether it is not time to have done with it all. A floor of boards is not so sturdy as one of earth, and the thought of a piece of earth of my own
returns to haunt me even in my present happiness. Fleur needs a safe place, a home. A cottage by a village, a hearth, some ducks and a goat, a vegetable garden…Maybe my life at the abbey has lost me my taste for the wandering life, or maybe I begin to feel the approach of winter. I count my gold with more than greed in my heart and promise myself that before the winter comes I will have my cottage, my hearth…Fleur bangs her drum, laughing.
Over a year has passed since I left the abbey. I still dream of it sometimes, of the friends I left there, of my sweet Perette—how I wish I could have taken her with us! In some ways I miss the abbey life; I miss my herb garden, the companionship of the chapter house, the library, the Latin lessons, the long walks across the flats to the sea. But we are free here. Fleur’s nightmares have long since stopped, and this year has seen her grow taller, her hair darkened to russet but still bleached at the ends by the island’s sun, and though the knowledge sometimes saddens me that minute by minute she grows away from me into the young girl—the adult—she will one day become, she is still the same sweet Fleur, wilful yet trusting and filled with open wonder at the world.
Last week a messenger, traveling with a group of players from the North, brought me a packet. It was addressed to Juliett Ser Auguste, Dancer, in a round hand that I did not recognize, and it bore signs of having been carried for many months before the players came to me by chance. There was no address upon the packet, but my messenger told me it had been given him by a nun from Brittany some five months ago.
I opened it. The packet contained a leaf of thick paper, close-written in the same unfamiliar round hand, plus two printed news sheets. As I unfolded them something fell out from between the papers and rang upon the ground. I stooped to pick it up. It was a small enameled medallion that I knew well: on it was Christina Mirabilis, the miracle worker, floating arms outstretched within a ring of orange flame.