Chapel Noir (13 page)

Luckily, the bird and the snakes were restricted in movement, at least some of the time.

So I made my morning rounds and saw that all were fed and had clean quarters and were not engaged in eating each other, or seeking to avoid being eaten by each other.

Although I do believe that they were all evenly matched and hence unlikely to harm any but the unwary human.

I intended to see that the unwary human was not I.

While Sophie bustled about the rooms, scrubbing and dusting and sighing, I pretended to do needlework, and Irene pretended to read and play scales.

Finally, Sophie left us a cold supper and departed for her room to mend linens.

Irene and I took one look at the repast: chicken, and retired upstairs before the sun set to our respective featherbeds.

Once again I awoke in the utter dark of a French countryside, as far from Shropshire as I could ever have imagined myself to be, to the sound of strife.

I heard not thunderous rapping on our broad safe door, but cries and whimpers, almost of an abused child. The governess in me started up, hurling myself out of bed. The shock of cold boards on my bare feet woke me fully, and I fumbled for the candleholder. Not to light it, but to seize it as a weapon.

A louder cry made me launch myself at the dark, hunting for remembered objects and distances, smashing into the doorjamb, then lumbering down the hall, rubbing painful elbows with the rough stucco surfaces.

The sounds were coming from Irene and Godfrey’s bedroom.

I ran facefirst into the closed door, then flailed to find the handle. I must have sounded like a small herd of elephants to the room’s occupants, but the gasps and cries continued despite my clumsy arrival.

At last the cold iron of the doorknob turned with one desperate wrench, and I felt the door swing wide.

The muted sounds paused. Then Irene screamed, a spine-chilling, heart-stopping aria of a scream not ten feet from where I stood.

I threw myself in the direction of the bed to arrive and find the linens in an uprising. Had the robbers I feared the previous night come in fact now?

A form from the dark met me as if demon-possessed.

I was determined not to be overpowered. We lurched back and forth in the bed linens. I had no time to speculate on who—or what—I fought. I heard its labored breath, and my own. Something sharp cracked on my forearm, and I could not repress a cry of distress.

The bedclothes grew still of a sudden.

“Nell?” Irene’s voice asked, husky.

“Irene!”

“You
are the attacker?” she demanded.

“You
are the housebreaker?”

“We need some light,” she decreed firmly, as God must have on the First Day.

I felt the mattress shift as she knocked over what sounded like a great many things on the nightstand.

At last a match scraped into a spark and then a candlewick tremored into flame with a pungent scent of sulphur.

We sat staring at each other over a tangled welter of bedclothes.

“Only you?” I was amazed.

“Only you!” she replied, with a relieved laugh. I noticed that her face was the same pale shade of ecru as the sheeting. And her laugh contained what even she would define as far too much tremolo.

“Why did you cry out?” I asked.

Irene’s face took on an expression I had never seen on it before. Sheepish, we would say in Shropshire.

“I, ah . . . it was a nightmare, Nell.”

“A nightmare! You never had nightmares in all the years we shared rooms in Saffron Hill.”

Irene pushed the feather pillows into a mound against the old wooden headboard, drew up her knees until her bed shirt’s ruffles covered her bare toes, and nodded.

“That’s true. But I had never seen Jack the Ripper’s work during all those years in Saffron Hill.”

I mounded the remaining pillows (she and Godfrey favored a great many for some reason) into my arms and collapsed upon them, feeling like a girl again, or at least a young governess who’d come in to quiet a charge’s nighttime frights.

“It was a dreadful scene, that is true,” I agreed, “but we were spared the worst by the confusing tangle of the clothing.”

“It did not spawn nightmares for you?”

“No. Not yet. I do not understand, Irene. You are ever so much more adventuresome than I am, yet I have never seen you so upset. We have seen corpses before.”

My blunt term made her shudder, then shiver. She drew the coverlet that was half on the floor close around her shoulders and almost up to her nose.

“It is my cursed theatrical imagination, Nell. Usually it works for me. No matter how . . . terrible and distasteful the scene, I pretend it is
Otello
, or
Lucia di Lammermoor
or
La Traviata
, so I am but a poor performer who frets my hour in the presence of whatever horror we have encountered. And the two drowned men we saw were victims of natural elements, even if one was deliberately held underwater. This was a scene of carnage incarnate. Yes, the dress was disarranged, but in such a way that I could guess at the unthinkable excess of the wounds.”

“So it is always a play to you: murder and crime?”

“No. I did not say that. Only that my part in it, my role as observer, feels as it would on a stage. I must play it to the hilt. Oh, dreadful metaphor! I can stave off full realization of what has happened because I see myself as playacting, do you understand, Nell? Tonight, when I slept, in my dreams, I was no longer playacting.” She bit her lip. “And I deeply regret leaving Pink in that place.”

“So do I! And not because of the poor dead women! I do not believe in ghosts, Irene, although I enjoy reading about them, but I do believe in sin, and that house of death is also a house of iniquity.”

Irene did not seem to be listening to me, but rather watching me with cautious wonder. “You are not . . . disturbed by what we saw last night?”

“Of course I am. Deeply. Imagine! Bram Stoker in that place of infamy. And the Prince of Wales, not only there, but possessed of the odious notion that you . . . that he . . . that the unthinkable—Yes, I was most distressed and had great trouble falling asleep. I must have spent half an hour twisting and turning until my linens make this tumult look like nothing.”

Irene said nothing for a moment, then smiled. “I wish our fender from Saffron Hill were here, and we could cook some tea and toast some scones.”

“Tea and scones are in the pantry far below,” I pointed out. “And neither of us is wearing bed slippers.”

“There is a decanter of brandy by the window seat.”

I stared in that dim direction. “
I
am not going to ice my feet again in search of spiritous liquors.”

“Oh,” Irene said, huddling under the coverlet and looking no more ready than I to leave the warmth our bodies had won from the bedclothes. “Perhaps I had the nightmare because Godfrey is gone.”

“Indeed. We are undefended in this drafty cottage. I almost wish we lived in Paris proper, and you can see how strongly I must feel to make such a despicable weakness known.”

“Indeed, Paris seems custom-made for the despicably weak,” Irene said with the old sly tone I recognized and took for her returning equanimity. She sobered instantly. “This is a bad business, Nell. Far worse than anything we have ever been drawn into before.”

“Why do you think I got no rest for half an hour upon retiring? I know that.”

“I should not have allowed you into this affair.” Her face and body twisted in uncharacteristic expression of an emotion I had never detected in her before: guilt.

“And who are you to ‘allow’ me or not allow me anything?”

“Now you would have me be condescending as well as overprotective. But I know far more of the ways of the world than you do, and would like to keep it that way.”

“So I am sure that I would prefer it, save that I deplore being ignorant, even if it is better for me, and I do see that it might be. How I wish I had never known that the Prince of Wales has been allowed to assume, to presume, to dare to think that you have succumbed to His Royal Lowness like apparently scores of women before you!”

“I was young when that choice was thrust upon me. I would not do it now. But you understand that it was the lesser of two evils at the time.”

“Your reputation—”

“Reputation can be falsely tarnished. At least in this case I did it myself. And I know it to be a falsehood. Before a Rothschild ever became a baron, the family reputation was impugned again and again. It still is.”

“Not by anything so distorting as your imagined alliance with the Prince of Wales!”

“No? What of the rumor that Baron Alphonse had a child out of wedlock by a mistress?”

“I suppose it could be true.”

“And that he sent mother and child packing, until they were forced into a brothel, then he came and knowingly patronized his own virginal daughter?”

“Baron Alphonse! I have some judge of character, Christian or not, and that certainly would be impossible. What a vile and twisted lie—”

“So you see what a minor deception my trick on Bertie was? He is a benign sort of tyrant, your Prince of Wales. If you allow him his self-deceptions, he will underwrite your own.”

“But it is corrupt! All society is corrupt.”

“Yes!” Irene trumpeted the single word like a professor well pleased with a student’s hard-won correct answer. “That is what I had hoped to spare you, but you will not let me.”

A silence fell between us.

“I am not having nightmares,” I said finally.

She was silent in turn, then sighed as if from the bottom of her soul.

“Not . . . yet.”

14.
Gypsy Fortune

He makes love in the same wild way that he drinks, all is
a sensual quest for some elusive transcendence. All his
appetites demand excess, even his love for the eerie gupsy
music that makes violins wail like wolves mating with banshees
. . .
—
NOTE TO MYSELF

FROM A YELLOW BOOK

I went among the Gypsies tonight.

The campsite reeked of dog dung and old piss, spilled wine, smoke and sausages, but the music and laughter were a symphony for my soul.

Paris, London, Rome, Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, St. Petersburg . . . they have their palaces and dynasties, theaters and opera houses and museums, their universities and government ministries, but those grand and glorious buildings and the pretenses of the people who haunt them are all so many houses of cards.

The old Gypsy, Tasarla, lays out her dirty pack of tarot, telling me my latest fortune. The tarot cards are worn to faint images. She seems to recognize each card by touch as much as sight. I cross her seamed palm (with the lifeline that curls around the mount of her thumb into the bracelet lines of the wrist and across the back of her hand) with foreign silver until she deals the cards again and again, giving me the amusement of an array of various fortunes.

Some are dire, some triumphant, all are ambiguous and oddly apropos.

To the people in the great cities and palaces, the Gypsies are a distant, stinking mist at the vast, unknown rim of the civilized world, where peasants toil to supply the wood and wheat that make the glittering cities go.

Most of the world is raw land ruled by rawer emotions, but the great in their cities seldom see that. Although I have walked on their marble floors and Aubusson carpets, I am never more alive than here, my feet on a carpet of dead leaves, my chair not gilded but a pile of tattered Turkey rugs.

The Gypsies drift at the edges of the great cities and settle like fog on the wastes between the towns, selling their inferior crafts and moving on before the mendacity is discovered, telling their mysterious fortunes, dancing and drinking around their campfires, to the music of fiddles and wolves.

They are an unholy lot of beggars too proud to beg and thieves too accomplished to bother stealing real riches.

The young girls wear their gold and grime like ornaments of equal value, and are given in marriage among themselves in childhood, reaching a man’s hands and first blood at the same time. The Gypsies give their women to men from the cities or towns at the drop of a copper, but as usual the exchange is always in their favor, and the favors given are short and unfulfilling.

He is here, of course, prodigiously drunk.

Although, with time, I have come to move among the Gypsies as I please (and as long as I pay sufficiently), a rare honor for a non-Romany, he pays nothing.

Like a young wolf he strides into their campground, pissing where he pleases.

His strange, savage vitality fascinates the Romany as much as it does me.

He brings his own brew, the potent liquor of a land even wilder than the imagination, and his intoxication never brings him to his knees, only to more fascinating excesses.

When the fire flares high and the violins wail like wolves, he is dancing in their midst. His clumsy boots both seem to break the ground and break free of the ground. Gypsies dance like demons, but he is the very Devil himself. I have seen the mad, swirling tarantella of southern Italy and the whirling dervishes of Afghanistan. They cannot compare. Frenzy. Fever. Inhuman energy. He dances alone, and the violinists are sawing their arms off, sweltering in sweat, on their knees, silencing one by one.

And still he dances. When at last he drops of exhaustion, the girls run to pour water down his throat. He soon submits them to his gropings and, having assembled his harem of the night, calls for more wine and more women.

He never pays for his pleasures, but takes them, and the Gypsies let him, even celebrating his violations of the laws of all decent society and their own ancient, cruel, and pragmatic code.

While Tasarla lays down a Hanged Man for me, for instance, he is lying like a sultan on a pile of rugs, his gathered pants disarranged, his huge hands tangling in the bodice laces of three nubile Gypsy girls in turn, exposing their breasts like a housewife weighing apples on a market stand and buying none.

He is barely twenty, but like all men must have younger women, even if they are twelve.

Yet I have seen him come behind some Gypsy matron of forty tending the campfire, embracing her with clumsy possession, groping under her many layers of coarse skirts. The men laugh, the violins screech and whine approval, the gold coins the women wear chitter with excitement.

Even I find myself excited by his audacity, by the extremes to which the liquor will lead him, by watching him.

The Gypsies are feral, abiding by their own mystical and clannish rules, mystical and savage. It is hard to study savagery without being taken with it. Civilization, I have found in my travels, is merely the velvet glove over the steel fist that all mankind aspires to.

I have not yet decided how to use him, but there will be a way.