The clog lay where it had fallen, on its side, square in the center of a scrubbed flagstone. With the intense fixation of fever, I was unable to take my eyes off it. I traced the impossibly smooth curve of the worn edge over and over, each time pulling back my gaze from the impenetrable darkness of the inside. If I let myself enter that blackness, my soul would be sucked out into chaos. As my eyes rested on it, I could hear again the sounds of the time passage through the circle of stones, and I flung out my arms, clutching frantically at the wadded bedding, seeking some anchorage against confusion.
Suddenly an arm shot through the draperies, and a work-reddened hand snatched up the shoe and disappeared. Deprived of focus, my heat-addled mind spun round the grooves of the flags for a time, then, soothed by the geometric regularity, turned inward and wobbled into sleep like a dying top.
There was no stillness in my dreams, though, and I stumbled wearily through mazes of repeating figures, endless loopings and whorls. It was with a sense of profound relief that I saw at last the irregularities of a human face.
And an irregular face it was, to be sure, screwed up as it was in a ferocious frown, lips pursed in adjuration. It was only as I felt the pressure of the hand over my mouth that I realized I was no longer asleep.
The long, lipless mouth of the gargoyle hovered next to my ear.
“Be still, ma chère! If they find me here again, I’m done for!” The large, dark eyes darted from side to side, keeping watch for any movement of the drapes.
I nodded slowly, and he released my mouth, his fingers leaving a faint whiff of ammonium and sulfur behind. He had somewhere found—or stolen, I thought dimly—a ragged gray friar’s gown to cover the grimy velvet of his apothecary’s robe, and the depths of the hood concealed both the telltale silver hair and that monstrous forehead.
The fevered delusions receded slightly, displaced by what remnants of curiosity remained to me. I was too weak to say more than “What…” when he placed a finger once more across my lips, and threw back the sheet covering me.
I watched in some bemusement as he rapidly unknotted the strings of my shift and opened the garment to the waist. His movements were swift and businesslike, completely lacking in lechery. Not that I could imagine anyone capable of trying to ravish a fever-wracked carcass like mine, particularly not within hearing of Mother Hildegarde. But still…
I watched with remote fascination as he placed his cupped hands on my breasts. They were broad and almost square, the fingers all of a length, with unusually long and supple thumbs that curved around my breasts with amazing delicacy. Watching them, I had an unusually vivid memory of Marian Jenkinson, a girl with whom I had trained at Pembroke Hospital, telling the rapt inmates of the nurses’ quarters that the size and shape of a man’s thumbs were a sure indication of the quality of his more intimate appendage.
“And it’s true, I swear it,” Marian would declare, shaking back her blond hair dramatically. But when pressed for examples, she would only giggle and dimple, rolling her eyes toward Lieutenant Hanley, who strongly resembled a gorilla, opposable—and sizable—thumbs notwithstanding.
The large thumbs were pressing gently but firmly into my flesh, and I could feel my swollen nipples rising against the hard palms, cold by comparison with my own heated skin.
“Jamie,” I said, and a shiver passed over me.
“Hush, madonna,” said Raymond. His voice was low, kind but somehow abstracted, as though he were paying no attention to me, in spite of what he was doing.
The shiver came back; it was as though the heat passed from me to him, but his hands did not warm. His fingers stayed cool, and I chilled and shook as the fever ebbed and flowed, draining from my bones.
The afternoon light was dim through the thick gauze of the drapes around my bed, and Raymond’s hands were dark on the white flesh of my breasts. The shadows between the thick, grimy fingers were not black, though. They were…blue, I thought.
I closed my eyes, looking at the particolored swirl of patterns that immediately appeared behind my lids. When I opened them again, it was as though something of the color remained behind, coating Raymond’s hands.
As the fever ebbed, leaving my mind clearer, I blinked, trying to raise my head for a better look. Raymond pressed slightly harder, urging me to lie back, and I let my head fall on the pillow, peering slantwise over my chest.
I wasn’t imagining it after all—or was I? While Raymond’s hands weren’t moving themselves, a faint flicker of colored light seemed to move over them, shedding a glow of rose and a pallor of blue across my own white skin.
My breasts were warming now, but warming with the natural heat of health, not the gnawing burn of fever. The draft from the open archway outside found a way through the drapes and lifted the damp hair at my temples, but I wasn’t chilled now.
Raymond’s head was bent, face hidden by the cowl of his borrowed robe. After what seemed a long time, he moved his hands from my breasts, very slowly over my arms, pausing and squeezing gently at the joints of shoulder and elbow, wrists and fingers. The soreness eased, and I thought I could see briefly a faint blue line within my upper arm, the glowing ghost of the bone.
Always touching, never hurrying, he brought his hands back over the shallow curve of my collarbone and down the meridian of my body, splaying his palms across my ribs.
The oddest thing about all this was that I was not at all astonished. It seemed an infinitely natural thing, and my tortured body relaxed gratefully into the hard mold of his hands, melting and reforming like molded wax. Only the lines of my skeleton held firm.
An odd feeling of warmth now emanated from those broad, square, workman’s hands. They moved with painstaking slowness over my body, and I could feel the tiny deaths of the bacteria that inhabited my blood, small explosions as each scintilla of infection disappeared. I could feel each interior organ, complete and three-dimensional, and see it as well, as though it sat on a table before me. There the hollow-walled stomach, here the lobed solidness of my liver, and each convolution and twist of intestine, turned in and on and around itself, neatly packed in the shining web of its mesentery membrane. The warmth glowed and spread within each organ, illuminating it like a small sun within me, then died and moved on.
Raymond paused, hands pressed side by side on my swollen belly. I thought he frowned, but it was hard to tell. The cowled head turned, listening, but the usual noises of the hospital continued in the distance, with no warning heeltaps coming our way.
I gasped and moved involuntarily, as one hand moved lower, cupped briefly between my legs. An increase in pressure from the other hand warned me to be silent, and the blunt fingers eased their way inside me.
I closed my eyes and waited, feeling my inner walls adjust to this odd intrusion, the inflammation subsiding bit by bit as he probed gently deeper.
Now he touched the center of my loss, and a spasm of pain contracted the heavy walls of my inflamed uterus. I breathed a small moan, then clamped my lips as he shook his head.
The other hand slid down to rest comfortingly on my belly as the groping fingers of the other touched my womb. He was still then, holding the source of my pain between his two hands as though it were a sphere of crystal, heavy and fragile.
“Now,” he said softly. “Call him. Call the red man. Call him.”
The pressure of the fingers within and the palm without grew harder, and I pressed my legs against the the bed, fighting it. But there was no strength left in me to resist, and the inexorable pressure went on, cracking the crystal sphere, freeing the chaos within.
My mind filled with images, worse than the misery of the fever-dreams, because more real. Grief and loss and fear racked me, and the dusty scent of death and white chalk filled my nostrils. Casting about in the random patterns of my mind for help, I heard the voice still muttering, patiently but firmly, “Call him,” and I sought my anchor.
“Jamie! JAMIE!”
A bolt of heat shot through my belly, from one hand to
the other, like an arrow through the center of the basin of my bones. The pressing grip relaxed, slid free, and the lightness of harmony filled me.
The bedframe quivered as he ducked beneath it, barely in time.
“Milady! Are you all right?” Sister Angelique shoved through the drapes, round face creased with worry beneath her wimple. The concern in her eyes was underlaid with resignation; the sisters knew I would die soon—if this looked to be my last struggle, she was prepared to summon the priest.
Her small, hard hand rested briefly against my cheek, moved quickly to my brow, then back. The sheet still lay crumpled around my thighs, and my gown lay open. Her hands slid inside it, into my armpits, where they remained for a moment before withdrawing.
“God be praised!” she cried, eyes moistening. “The fever is gone!” She bent close, peering in sudden alarm, to be sure that the disappearance of the fever was not due to the fact that I was dead. I smiled at her weakly.
“I’m all right,” I said. “Tell Mother.”
She nodded eagerly, and pausing only long enough to draw the sheet modestly over me, she hurried from the room. The drapes had hardly swung closed behind her when Raymond emerged from under the bed.
“I must go,” he said. He laid a hand upon my head. “Be well, madonna.”
Weak as I was, I rose up, grasping his arm. I slid my hand up the length of forge-tough muscle, seeking, but not finding. The smoothness of his skin was unblemished, clear to the crest of the shoulder. He stared down at me in astonishment.
“What are you doing, madonna?”
“Nothing.” I sank back, disappointed. I was too weak and too light-headed to be careful of my words.
“I wanted to see whether you had a vaccination scar.”
“Vaccination?” Skilled as I was at reading faces by now, I would have seen the slightest twitch of comprehension, no matter how swiftly it was concealed. But there was none.
“Why do you call me madonna still?” I asked. My hands rested on the slight concavity of my stomach, gently as though not to disturb the shattering emptiness. “I’ve lost my child.”
He looked mildly surprised.
“Ah. I did not call you madonna because you were with child, my lady.”
“Why, then?” I didn’t really expect him to answer, but he did. Tired and drained as we both were, it was as though we were suspended together in a place where neither time nor consequence existed; there was room for nothing but truth between us.
He sighed.
“Everyone has a color about them,” he said simply. “All around them, like a cloud. Yours is blue, madonna. Like the Virgin’s cloak. Like my own.”
The gauze curtain fluttered briefly and he was gone.
26
FONTAINEBLEAU
For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep.
A few days later I woke to the sound of insistent voices near my ear, and the touch of hands lifting me from the bed. The arms that held me were strong and masculine, and for a moment, I felt afloat in joy. Then I woke all the way, struggling feebly against a wave of tobacco and cheap wine, to find myself in the grasp of Hugo, Louise de La Tour’s enormous footman.
“Put me down!” I said, batting at him weakly. He looked startled at this sudden resurrection from the dead, and nearly dropped me, but a high, commanding voice stopped both of us.
“Claire, my dear friend! Do not be afraid, ma chère, it’s all right. I am taking you to Fontainebleau. The air, and good food—it’s what you need. And rest, you need rest…”
I blinked against the light like a newborn lamb. Louise’s face, round, pink, and anxious, floated nearby like a cherub on a cloud. Mother Hildegarde stood behind her, tall and stern as the angel at the gates of Eden, the heavenly illusion enhanced by the fact that they were both standing in front of the stained-glass window in the vestibule of the Hôpital.
“Yes,” she said, her deep voice making the simplest word more emphatic than all Louise’s twittering. “It will be good for you. Au revoir, my dear.”
And with that, I was borne down the steps of the Hôpital and stuffed willy-nilly into Louise’s coach, with neither strength nor will to protest.
The bumping of the coach over potholes and ruts kept me awake on the journey to Fontainebleau. That, and Louise’s constant conversation, aimed at reassurance. At first I made some dazed attempt to respond, but soon realized that she required no answers, and in fact, talked more easily without them.
After days in the cool gray stone vault of the Hôpital, I felt like a freshly unwrapped mummy, and shrank from the assault of so much brightness and color. I found it easier to deal with if I drew back a bit, and let it all wash past me without trying to distinguish its elements.
This strategy worked until we reached a small wood just outside Fontainebleau. The trunks of the oaks were dark and thick, with low, spreading canopies that shadowed the ground beneath with shifting light, so that the whole wood seemed to be moving slightly in the wind. I was vaguely admiring the effect, when I noticed that some of what I had assumed to be tree trunks were in fact moving, turning very slowly to and fro.
“Louise!” My exclamation and my grip on her arm stopped her chatter in mid-word.
She lunged heavily across me to see what I was looking at, then flopped back to her side of the carriage and thrust her head out of the window, shouting at the coachman.
We came to a slithering, dusty halt just opposite the wood. There were three of them, two men and a woman. Louise’s high, agitated voice went on, expostulating and questioning, punctuated by the coachman’s attempts to explain or apologize, but I paid no attention.
In spite of their turning and the small fluttering of their clothing, they were very still, more inert than the trees that held them. The faces were black with suffocation; Monsieur Forez wouldn’t have approved at all, I thought, through the haze of shock. An amateur execution, but effective, for all that. The wind shifted, and a faint, gassy stink blew over us.
Louise shrieked and pounded on the window frame in a frenzy of indignation, and the carriage started with a jerk that rocked her back in the seat.
“Merde!” she said, rapidly fanning her flushed face. “The idiocy of that fool, stopping like that right there! What recklessness! The shock of it is bad for the baby, I am sure, and you, my poor dear.…oh, dear, my poor Claire! I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to remind you…how can you forgive me, I’m so tactless…”
Luckily her agitation at possibly having upset me made her forget her own upset at sight of the bodies, but it was very wearying, trying to stem her apologies. At last, in desperation, I changed the subject back to the hanged ones.
“Who?” The distraction worked; she blinked, and remembering the shock to her système, pulled out a bottle of ammoniac spirits and took a hearty sniff that made her sneeze in reflex.
“Hugue…choo! Huguenots,” she got out, snorting and wheezing. “Protestant heretics. That’s what the coachman says.”
“They hang them? Still?” Somehow, I had thought such religious persecution a relic of earlier times.
“Well, not just for being Protestants usually, though that’s enough,” Louise said, sniffing. She dabbed her nose delicately with an embroidered handkerchief, examined the results critically, then reapplied the cloth to her nose and blew it with a satisfying honk.
“Ah, that’s better.” She tucked the handkerchief back in her pocket and leaned back with a sigh. “Now I am restored. What a shock! If they have to hang them, that’s all well, but must they do so by a public thoroughfare, where ladies must be exposed to such disgustingness? Did you smell them? Pheew! This is the Comte Medard’s land; I’ll send him a very nasty letter ab
out it, see if I don’t.”
“But why did they hang these people?” I asked, interrupting in the brutal manner that was the only possible way of actually conversing with Louise.
“Oh, witchcraft, most likely. There was a woman, you saw. Usually it’s witchcraft when the women are involved. If it’s only men, most often it’s just preaching sedition and heresy, but the women don’t preach. Did you see the ugly dark clothes she had on? Horrible! So depressing only to wear dark colors all the time; what kind of religion would make its followers wear such plain clothes all the time? Obviously the Devil’s work, anyone can see that. They are afraid of women, that’s what it is, so they…”
I closed my eyes and leaned back in the seat. I hoped it wasn’t very far to Louise’s country house.