Holy Fools (7 page)

Meanwhile, it seemed that once again LeMerle might be overwhelmed by the numbers of people wanting to touch him. Far from howling after his blood, however, it seemed that all were now desperate for his forgiveness. Hands reached out from every direction, plucking at his clothes, brushing his skin-I saw a man shake hands with him, and suddenly everyone in the room wanted to shake the hand of the one who had touched the holy man. Of course, LeMerle was enjoying every minute.

“Bless you, my brother. My sister.” Gradually, almost imperceptibly, I heard his register shift from pulpit to marketplace. The reckless light danced in his eyes: God help them, perhaps they took it for piety. And then, perhaps out of mischief, perhaps because the Blackbird could never resist a wager, he took it further.

“It’s a good thing for you that I did come to Épinal,” he told them slyly. “The air is thick with evil spirits here, the sky leaden with sin. If the plague has come upon you, ask yourselves the reason. You must know that the pure in heart are safe from the manifestations of the Evil One.”

There came uneasy murmurings from the audience.

“Ask yourselves how
I
manage to travel without fear,” he continued. “Ask yourselves how a simple cleric could withstand hell’s assault so surely for so many years.” His voice, tough carrying, was persuasively soft. “Years ago, a holy man, my tutor, devised a philter against all forms of demonic aggression; evil visions; succubi and incubi; diseases and poisons of the mind. A distillate of twenty-four different herbs, salt, and holy water, the whole to be blest by twelve bishops and used in infinitesimal quantities-” There was a pause as he studied the dramatic effect of his words. “For the past ten years, this elixir has kept me from harm,” he went on. “And I know of no place where it is more needed than in the town of Épinal today.”

I should have known LeMerle would not stop there. Why did he do these things? I asked myself. Was it revenge, contempt for their credulousness, the sheer glory of his adopted sainthood? Was it the chance to make a profit? Or was it just to win the game? I frowned at him from my place at the back of the courtroom, but he was in full voice now, and there was no stopping him. He saw my warning look, though, and grinned.

There was one problem, however, he told the crowd. Although he would willingly have given them the philter at no cost, he had only one flask with him. He could make more, but the herbs were rare and difficult to come by, and besides, the twelve bishops made such a thing impossible to prepare at short notice. As a result, though it hurt him to ask, he would be obliged to take a modest sum from each person. Then, perhaps if each of the good townspeople were to provide a small bottle of plain water or wine, then with an eyedropper he might create a more dilute mixture…

The takers were many. They lined the street until after sunset with their bottles and vials and LeMerle greeted everyone with solemn courtesy as he measured out the drops of clear fluid with a glass rod. They paid in coin and in goods-a fat duck, a bottle of wine, a handful of coins. Some drank the mixture straightaway, for fear of the plague. Many came back for more, having noticed an immediate, miraculous improvement in their health, although LeMerle generously made them wait until all the townsfolk had had their share before charging them a second time.

I could not bear to watch him preen any longer. Instead, I sought out the others and helped them move their caravans and set up camp. I was angry to find that our caravans had been looted during the day and our torn and muddied belongings strewn across the marketplace, but told myself that it could have been much worse. I had few valuables in any case, the most serious loss to me being that of my casket of herbs and medicines, and the only possessions I truly prized-the tarot cards made for me by Giordano and the few books he left me when we separated in Flanders-I retrieved unscathed from an alleyway into which they had been thrown by looters with no idea of their use. Besides, I told myself, what were a few torn costumes against the wealth we had collected that afternoon? LeMerle must have made enough to buy back our finery ten times over. Perhaps this time, I thought wistfully, my share might be enough for me to buy a piece of land on which to build a cottage…

The slight roundness at my belly felt very small to be leading my thoughts in this direction, but I knew that in six months’ time l’Ailée would be earthbound for good, and something told me that perhaps I ought to make my bargain with LeMerle now, while I still could. I admired him-loved him still-but trusted him, never. He knew nothing of my secret, and he would not have hesitated to exploit the knowledge if he had.

And yet it was difficult to think of leaving him. I had considered it many times-I had even packed my bags once or twice-but until now there had always been something to give me pause. The adventure, perhaps. The perpetual adventure. I had loved my years with LeMerle; I loved being l’Ailée; I loved our plays and satires and flights of fancy. But now I sensed, more urgently than ever, that it was coming to an end. The child inside me already seemed to have a will of her own, and I knew that this was no life for her. LeMerle had never stopped chasing his tigers, and I knew that one day his audacity would drag us into some final game that would blow up in his face like one of Giordano’s powders. It had almost happened at Épinal: only luck had saved us. How much longer would his luck hold out?

It was late when LeMerle finally packed up his baggage to leave. He declined the offer of a room at the inn, claiming to prefer simpler accommodation. A clearing just out of town served for our camp, and exhausted, we prepared for the night. I touched the small roundness at my belly for one last time as I curled onto my horsehair mattress.
Tomorrow,
I promised silently.

I’d leave him tomorrow.

No one heard him
go. Perhaps he muffled his horses’ hooves with rags, winding strips of cloth around his harness and wheels. Perhaps the dawn mist helped him, deadening the sound of his escape. Perhaps I was simply too tired, too absorbed in myself and my unborn child to care this time whether he stayed or left. Until that night there had always been a link between us, stronger than the infatuation I had once felt, or the nights we had been lovers. I thought I knew him. I knew his whims and his games and his random cruelties. There was nothing he could do that would surprise or shock me.

When I realized my mistake, it was already too late. The bird had flown; our trickery had been discovered; Le Borgne was lying under his caravan with a slit throat, and the soldiers of the new Inquisition were waiting for us in the false dawn with crossbows and swords, chains and rope. There was one thing we had all failed to take into account in our planning, one small thing, which made all of our winnings suddenly void.

During the night, Judge Rémy had come home.

I have little recollection
of that day. Any recollection would be too much, but it comes to me sometimes in still pictures, like a lantern show. The guards’ hands as they dragged us from our beds. Our clothes falling to the ground as they were cut from our bodies. More than anything else, I remember the sounds: the horses; the chink of metal harnesses; the cries of confusion; the shouted orders as we stumbled stupidly from sleep.

It took me too long to understand what had happened. If I had been more alert I might have escaped under cover of dark and the general chaos-Bouffon, especially, fought like a demon, and some of the guards had to leave us to attend to him-but I was still dazed, expecting LeMerle to appear at any moment with some plan for our release, and a moment later, the opportunity was lost.

He had abandoned us. He had saved himself, sensing perhaps the approach of danger and knowing that if we all fled together he would be more likely to be caught. Le Borgne, who might have revealed the trickery, was too dangerous to be left alive. They found the little man under his rig, his throat slit, his features deliberately mutilated. The rest of us-women, gypsies, dwarves, all easily replaceable-he flung to his pursuers like a handful of coins. What it came to, I told myself, was that LeMerle had sold us. Again.

But by the time I realized his betrayal it was too late. We were chained naked in a row with our wrists shackled, mounted guards watching over us on either side. Hermine was weeping noisily, her hair over her face. I walked behind her with my head held high. Bouffon limped along painfully at the back. The guard at my side-a fat swine of a man with mean eyes and a rosebud mouth-muttered a lewd comment, and put out his hand to brush my face. I looked at him in contempt. My eyes felt hot and dry as baking stones.

“Touch me once, even with the shadow of your little finger,” I told him softly, “and I’ll see to it your prick falls off. I know how to do it-a very
little
cantrip should be enough…”

The man bared his teeth. “You’ll get yours, bitch,” he mumbled. “I can wait.”

“I’m sure you can, pig. But remember that cantrip.”

Foolish to threaten him, I know. But my rage was blistering me from within: I had to say something or I would explode.

The thought went round and round my mind, dogged and stupid as a mule around a well wheel, slowly building as it went. How could he do this to me? To
me
? To Hermine, perhaps. To Bouffon and Becquot. To the dwarves. But me? Why didn’t he take me with him?

And it was this discovery about myself-the knowledge that if he had asked me to go with him I might have accepted-which fixed my hatred, then and forever. I had assumed I was better than this, better than the others with their weaknesses and their petty deceits. But LeMerle had held a mirror to my soul. Now I too was capable of betrayal. Of cowardice. Of murder. In my heart I saw it as I nursed my rage and dreamed of his blood. It rocked me as I slept. It clothed me as I walked.

The roundhouse cells were full, and they locked us in the cellars below the courtroom. Mine was cold, with a floor of trodden earth, the walls frosted with salty residue. I knew that mixed with a little sulfur and charcoal this white powder would make a satisfying explosion-but in this state, it was useless. There was no window; no way out but the locked door. I sat down on the damp floor and considered my position.

We were guilty. No one would dispute it. Judge Rémy could take his pick of the charges-God knows, LeMerle had given him enough to choose from. Theft, poisoning, impersonation, heresy, vagrancy, witchcraft, murder-any one of these deserved death according to the law. Someone else-a person of faith-might have found comfort in prayer, but I did not know how to pray. There is no God for the likes of us, Le Borgne used to say, for we were not made in his image. We are the holy fools, the half-made ones, the ones who came out broken from the kiln. How could we pray? And even if we could, what would we say to him?

And so I set my back against the stone and my feet on the baked-earth floor, and I stayed there as the dawn approached, cradling the new life in my belly with both hands and listening to the sounds of sobbing from the other side of the wall.

Something woke me
abruptly from my daze. The darkness was complete, but there was no mistaking the sound of a bolt being drawn, nor the stealthy approach of footsteps down the cellar steps. I struggled to my feet, keeping my back against the wall.

“Who’s there?” I whispered.

Now I could hear the slow intake of a man’s breath as he moved toward me, the sound of a robe brushing against the wall. I raised my fist in the darkness, my body trembling but my hand steady. I waited for him to come within range.

“Juliette?”

I froze. “Who are you? How did you know my name?”

“Juliette, please. We don’t have time.”

I lowered my fist gently to my side. I knew who it was; it was the Plague Doctor who had tried to warn me, whose voice had seemed so familiar. And I knew that smell too, that dry alchemical smell. In the darkness, with no noise or distractions, it was even more so. In the dark, my eyes widened.

“Giordano?”

There came an impatient hiss in the darkness. “I said there isn’t time, girl. Take this.” Something soft was flung across the cell toward me. A garment. It was a robe of some kind and smelt musty, but it was enough to cover my nakedness. Wondering, I pulled it over my head.

“Good. Now follow me, and quickly. You haven’t got long.”

The trapdoor at the top of the steps was open. The Plague Doctor went through first, and helped me follow him. The light in the passageway seemed blinding to one so long accustomed to darkness but came only from a single sconce. Still dazed, I turned toward my old friend and saw nothing but the long-nosed mask and black robe.

“Giordano?” I said again, putting out my hand to touch the papiermâché vizard.

The Plague Doctor shook his head. “Must you always be asking questions? I put a purgative in the guard’s soup. He’s been rushing to the latrine every ten minutes. And this time he left his key.” He made as if to push me toward the courtroom door.

“What about my friends?” I protested.

“There’s no time. If you escape alone, we both have a chance. Now will you go?”

I hesitated. In that moment I seemed to hear LeMerle’s voice from behind the black mask, and my own whispering its ugly, foolish reply.
Take me. Leave the others. But take me
.

Not again, I told myself fiercely. If LeMerle had asked me, perhaps I might have gone. But
if
is a small, uncertain word on which to build a future. I felt my unborn child move inside me and I knew that if I followed my cowardice now, LeMerle would always be there to taint my joy in her.

“Not without my friends,” I said.

The old man looked at me. “Stubborn,” he hissed as he fumbled with the locks. “Still the stubborn hussy that you always were. Perhaps they’re right, and you really are a witch. There must be some
dybbuk
inside that red head of yours. You’ll be the undoing of us both.”

The night smelt
of freedom. We drank it in furtively as we fled, each in a different direction. I would have stayed with the others, but Giordano forbade it so furiously that I obeyed. Through the streets of Épinal we ran, hiding in the shadows, picking our way through back alleys knee high in refuse. I was in a half dream, every sense accentuated beyond comprehension so that our flight seemed touched with a feverish unreality. Slices of memory: faces at an inn, gaping in soundless song in the light of a red lantern: the moon riding over a bank of clouds, an edge of forest black beneath: boots, a packet of food, a coat hidden beneath a bush in readiness: a mule tethered close by.

“Take it. It’s mine. No one will report it stolen.” He was still wearing his mask. A burst of affection for him almost overwhelmed me. “Giordano. After all these years. I thought you were dead.”

He made a dry sound that might have been laughter. “I don’t die easily,” he said. “Now will you begone?”

“Not yet,” I said. I was trembling now, half in fear, half in excitement. “I looked for you for so long, Giordano. What happened to the troupe? To Janette and Gabriel, to-”

“There isn’t time. I could talk to you all night and still you’d be asking questions.”

“One question, then,” I said, gripping his arm. “Just one, and I’ll go.”

He nodded heavily; in his mask he looked like a big, sad carrion bird. “I know,” he said at last. “Isabelle.”

I knew at that moment that my mother was dead. All those years I’d kept her untouched, like a locket worn close to my heart; her proud figure; her smile; her songs and cantrips. But she’d died in Flanders, Giordano told me, had died meaninglessly of the plague; now all that I had of her was fragments and dreams.

“Were you there?” I said in a broken voice.

“What do you think?” said Giordano.

Love not often, but forever
-it might have been my mother speaking, very quietly, behind the rasp of his breathing. I knew now why he had followed me; why he had risked his life for me and could not now bear to look at my face, or reveal his own behind the Plague Doctor’s mask.

“Take it off,” I told him. “I want to see you before I go.”

He looked old in the moonlight, his eyes sunk so far into his face that it looked like a different mask, eyeless still and more tragic in its attempt to smile. Moisture leaked from the holes and into the deep channels at either side of his mouth. I tried to put my arms around him, but he pulled away abruptly. He had always disliked physical contact.

“Good-bye, Juliette. Get away as quickly as you can.” His voice was that of the old Giordano, crisp and sour and clever. “For your safety and theirs, don’t seek out the others. Sell the mule when you have to. Travel at night.”

I hugged him anyway, though he was stiff and unresponsive in my arms, and kissed his old brow. From his clothes I again caught a familiar scent of spice and sulfur, the smell of his alchemical experiments, and I was engulfed in sorrow. In my arms I felt a tremor go through him, almost like a sob but deeper, from the bone, then he pulled away with a kind of anger.

“Every moment you lose is a wasted chance,” he said in a voice that shook a little. “Be off with you, Juliette.” In his mouth my name sounded like a dry caress.

“What will you do?” I protested. “What about you?”

He gave a tiny smile and shook his head as he had always done when I said something he considered particularly unintelligent. “I’ve compromised my soul enough for you, girl,” he said. “In case you’d forgotten, recall that I don’t travel on the Sabbath.”

Then he lifted me onto the mule’s back and slapped the creature’s flanks so that it leaped forward onto the forest path, its hooves tapping smartly on the dry earth. I still remember his face in the moonlight, his whispered farewell as the mule trotted down the path, the scent of earth and ashes in my nostrils and his voice as it pursued me with his
Shalom,
with the voice of my thirteenth year like that of my essential conscience pursuing me sourly, like the voice of God on the mountain.

I never saw him
again. From Épinal I traveled across Lorraine toward Paris, then back toward the coast as my belly increased. I foraged for food when Giordano’s supplies gave out and sold the mule on his advice. In the mule’s saddlebags I found such things as my old mentor had salvaged from my caravan-a little money, some books, the jewelry discarded among my costumes, paste indistinguishable from real. I dyed my hair to avoid detection. I listened attentively to the reports from Lorraine. But still there were no news, no names, no rumors of burnings. And yet a part of me is waiting still, five years later, as if time has been suspended since then, a quiet interval between two acts, a conflict unresolved that must one day inevitably end in blood.

My dreams show me his face again and again. His woodland eyes. Our passion play continues there, the stage empty but not abandoned, waiting for the players to resume their roles, my mouth opening to speak lines I thought I had long since forgotten.

One more dance,
he tells me as I twist and turn on my narrow bed.
You were always my favorite
.

I awake in sweat,
certain this time that Fleur is dead. Even when I have checked a dozen times I dare not turn over but stay listening to the soft sound of her breathing. The dorter seems filled with unquiet murmurings. My jaw is a vise clenched around my fear. Release it and my scream will last forever.