Holy Fools

1

It begins with the players. Seven of them, six men and a girl, she in sequins and ragged lace, they in leathers and silk. All of them masked, wigged, powdered, painted; Arlequin and Scaramouche and the long-nosed Plague Doctor, demure Isabelle and the lecherous Géronte, their gilded toenails bright beneath the dust of the road, their smiles whitened with chalk, their voices so harsh and so sweet that from the first they tore at my heart.

They arrived unannounced in a green and gold caravan, its panels scratched and scarred, but the scarlet inscription still legible for those who could read it.

LAZARILLO’S WORLD PLAYERS!

TRAGEDY AND COMEDY!

BEASTS AND MARVELS!

And all around the script paraded nymphs and satyrs, tigers and olifants in crimson, rose, and violet. Beneath, in gold, sprawled the proud words:

PLAYERS TO THE KING

I didn’t believe it myself, though they say old Henri had a commoner’s tastes, preferring a wild-beast show or a comédie-ballet to the most exquisite of tragedies. Why, I danced for him myself on the day of his wedding, under the austere gaze of his Marie. It was my finest hour.

Lazarillo’s troupe was nothing in comparison, and yet I found the display nostalgic, moving to a degree far beyond the skill of the players themselves. Perhaps a premonition; perhaps a fleeting vision of what once was, before the spoilers of the new Inquisition sent us into enforced sobriety, but as they danced, their purples and scarlets and greens ablaze in the sun’s glare, I seemed to see the brave, bright pennants of ancient armies moving out across the battlefield, a defiant gesture to the sheet-shakers and apostates of the new order.

The Beasts and Marvels of the inscription consisted of nothing more marvelous than a monkey in a red coat and a small black bear, but there was, besides the singing and the masquerade, a fire-eater, jugglers, musicians, acrobats, and even a rope-dancer, so that the courtyard was aflame with their presence, and Fleur laughed and squealed with delight, hugging me through the brown weave of my habit.

The dancer was dark and curly-haired, with gold rings on her feet. As we watched she sprang onto a taut rope held on one side by Géronte and on the other by Arlequin. At the tambourin’s sharp command they tossed her into the air, she turned a somersault, and landed back on the rope as neatly as I might once have done. Almost as neatly, in any case; for I was with the Théâtre des Cieux, and I was L’Ailée, the Winged One, the Sky-dancer, the Flying Harpy. When I took to the high rope on my day of triumph, there was a gasp and a silence and the audience-soft ladies, powdered men, bishops, tradesmen, servants, courtiers, even the king himself-blanched and stared. Even now I remember his face-his powdered curls, his eager eyes-and the deafening surge of applause. Pride’s a sin, of course, though personally I’ve never understood why. And some would say it’s pride brought me where I am today-brought low, if you like, though they say I’ll rise higher in the end. Oh, when Judgment Day comes I’ll dance with the angels, Soeur Marguerite tells me, but she’s a crazy, poor, twitching, tic-ridden thing, turning water into wine with the mixture from a bottle hidden beneath her mattress. She thinks I don’t know, but in our dorter, with only a thin partition between each narrow bed, no one keeps their secrets for long. No one, that is, but me.

The Abbey of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer stands on the western side of the half-island of Noirs Moustiers. It is a sprawling building set around a central courtyard, with wooden outbuildings to the side and around the back. For the past five years it has been my home; by far the longest time I have ever stayed in any place. I am Soeur Auguste-who I was does not concern us: not yet, anyway. The abbey is perhaps the only refuge where the past may be left behind. But the past is a sly sickness. It may be carried on a breath of wind; in the sound of a flute; on the feet of a dancer. Too late, as always, I see this now; but there is nowhere for me to go but forward. It begins with the players. Who knows where it may end?

The rope-dancer’s act was over. Now came juggling and music while the leader of the troupe-Lazarillo himself, I presumed-announced the show’s finale.

“And now, good sisters!” His voice, trained in theaters, rolled across the courtyard. “For your pleasure and edification, for your amusement and delight-Lazarillo’s World Players are proud to perform a Comedy of Manners, a most uproarious tale! I give you”-he paused dramatically, doffing his long-plumed tricorne-“Les Amours de l’Hermite!”

A crow, black bird of misfortune, flew overhead. For a second I felt the cool flicker of its shadow across my face and, with my fingers, forked the sign against malchance. Tsk-tsk, begone!

The crow seemed unmoved. He fluttered, ungainly, to the head of the well in the courtyard’s center, and I caught an impudent gleam of yellow from his eye. Below him, Lazarillo’s troupe proceeded, undisturbed. The crow cocked his head quickly, greasily, in my direction.

Tsk-tsk, begone! I once saw my mother banish a swarm of wild bees with nothing more than that cantrip; but the crow simply opened his beak at me in silence, exposing a blue sliver of tongue. I suppressed the urge to throw a stone.

Besides, the play was already beginning; an evil cleric wished to seduce a beautiful girl. She took refuge in a convent while her lover, a clown, tried to rescue her, disguised as a nun. They were discovered by the evil suitor, who swore that if he could not have the girl then no one would, only to be foiled by the sudden appearance of a monkey, which leaped onto the villain’s head, allowing the lovers to make good their escape.

The play was indifferent; the players themselves all but exhausted by the heat. Business must have been very bad, I thought, for the players to come to us. An island convent can offer little more than food and board-not even that, if rules are strictly applied. Maybe there had been trouble on the mainland. Times were hard for itinerants of all kinds. But Fleur loved the performance, clapping her hands and shouting encouragement to the squealing monkey. Next to her Perette, our youngest novice, looking rather like a monkey herself with her small vivid face and fluffy head, hooted with excitement.

The act was nearing its end. The lovers were reunited. The evil priest was unmasked. I felt slightly dizzy, as if the sun had turned my head, and in that moment I thought I saw someone else behind the players, standing against the light. I knew him at once; there was no mistaking the tilt of his head, or the way he stood, or the long shadow cast against the hard white ground. Knew him, though I saw him for no more than a second: Guy LeMerle, my very own black bird of ill-omen. Then he was gone.

This is how it begins: with the players, LeMerle, and the bird of malchance . Luck turns like the tide, my mother used to say. Maybe it was just our time to turn, as some heretics say the world turns, bringing creeping shadow to the places where once there was light. Maybe it was nothing. But even as the dancers capered and sang, spat fire from reddened lips, smirked from behind their masks, tumbled and rollicked and simpered and stamped the dirt with their gilded feet to the tune of tambour and flute, I seemed to perceive the shadow as it crept closer, covering scarlet petticoats and jingling tambourin, screaming monkey, motley, masks, Isabelle and Scaramouche with its long dark wing. I felt a shiver, even here in the midday sunlight with the whitewashed abbey walls buzzing with heat. The inexorable beginnings of momentum. The slow procession of our Last Days.

I’m not supposed to believe in signs and auguries. All that’s in the past now, with the Théâtre des Cieux. But why see LeMerle, of all people, and after all these years? What could it mean? The shadow across my eyes had already passed and the players were coming to the end of their masque, bowing, sweating, smiling, flinging rose petals over our heads. They had more than earned their board for the night and supplies for their journey.

Beside me, fat Soeur Antoine clapped her meaty hands, her face mottled with exertion. I was suddenly aware of the smell of her sweat, of the dust in my nostrils. Someone clawed my back; it was Soeur Marguerite, her pinched face halfway between pleasure and pain, mouth drawn down in a trembling bow of excitement. The reek of bodies intensified. And from the sisters lined against the heat-crackling walls of the abbey came a cry both shrill and oddly savage, an aüü! of pleasure and release, as if natural energies, loosened by the heat, had brought a kind of insanity to their applause. Aü! Encore! Aü! Encore!

Then I heard it; a single raised discordant voice, almost lost in a fury of acclamations. Mère Marie, I heard. Reverend Mother is…then once again the distracted buzzing of heat and voices, then the one voice again, higher than the rest.

I looked around for the source of the cry and saw Soeur Alfonsine, the consumptive nun, standing high upon the chapel steps, arms spread, her face white and exalted. Few of the sisters paid her any attention. Lazarillo’s troupe was taking a last bow; the actors went round once more with flowers and bonbons, the fire-eater gave a final spurt of flame; the monkey turned a somersault. Arlequin’s face was running with greasepaint; Isabelle-too old for the part, and with a visible paunch-was melting away in the heat, her scarlet mouth smeared halfway to her ears.

Soeur Alfonsine was still shouting, straining to be heard above the voices of the nuns. “It’s a judgment on us!” I thought she said. “A terrible judgment!”

Now some of the nuns looked exasperated; Alfonsine was never happier than when she was doing penance for something. “For pity’s sake, Alfonsine, what now?”

She fixed us with her martyr’s eyes. “My sisters!” she said, more in accusation than grief. “The Reverend Mother is dead!”

And at those words a silence fell over all of us. The players looked guilty and confused, as if aware that their welcome had been suddenly withdrawn. The tambourin player let his arm drop to his side in a harsh jangle of bells.

“Dead?” As if it could not be real in this iron heat, beneath this sledgehammer sky.

Alfonsine nodded; behind me, Soeur Marguerite was already beginning to keen. Miserere nobis, miserere nobis…

Fleur looked up at me, puzzled, and I caught her in my arms with sudden fierceness. “Is it finished?” she asked me. “Will the monkey dance again?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not? Was it the black bird?”

I looked at her, startled. Five years old and she sees everything. Her eyes are like pieces of mirror reflecting the sky-today blue, tomorrow the purple-gray of a storm cloud’s belly. “The black bird,” she repeated impatiently. “He’s gone now.”

I glanced back over my shoulder and saw that she was right. The crow had gone, his message delivered, and I knew then for certain that my premonition was true. Our time in the sunlight had finally come to an end. The masquerade was over.

2

We sent the players into town. They left with an air of hurt reproach, as if we had accused them of something. But it would not have been decent to keep them in the abbey: not in the presence of death. I brought their supplies myself-hay for the horses, bread, goat’s cheese rolled in cinders, and a bottle of good wine, for the sake of traveling theaters everywhere-and bade them good-bye.

Lazarillo gave me a keen look as he turned to go. “You look familiar, ma soeur. Could it be that we have met before?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve been here since I was a child.”

He shrugged. “Too many towns. Faces begin to look the same.”

I knew the feeling, although I did not say so.

“Times are hard, ma soeur. Remember us in your prayers.”

“Always.”

The Reverend Mother was lying on her narrow bed, looking even smaller and more desiccated than she had in life. Her eyes were closed, and Soeur Alfonsine had already replaced her quichenotte with the starched wimple, which the old woman had always refused.

“The quichenotte was good enough for us,” she used to say. “Kiss not, kiss not, we told the English soldiers, and wore the bonnet with the boned lappets to make sure they got the message. Who knows”-and here her eyes would light with sudden mischief-“maybe those English plunderers are hiding here still, and how then would I keep my virtue?”

She had collapsed in the field as she was digging potatoes, so Alfonsine told me. A minute later she was gone.

It was a good death, I tell myself. No pain; no priests; no fuss. And Reverend Mother was seventy-three-an unthinkable age-had already been frail when I joined the convent five years ago. But it was she who first made me welcome here, she who delivered Fleur, and once more, grief surprises me like an unexpected friend. She had seemed immortal, you see: an immovable landmark on this small horizon. Kindly, simple Mère Marie, walking the potato fields with her apron gathered up peasant-fashion over her skirt.

The potatoes were her pride, for though little else grows well in this bitter soil, these fruit are highly prized on the mainland, and their sale-along with that of our salt and the jars of pickled salicorne-ensures us enough revenue to maintain our little independence. That and the tithes bring us a prosperous enough life, even for one who has been used to the freedom of the roads, for at my age it’s time to have done with the dangers and the thrills, and in any case, I remind myself, even with the Théâtre des Cieux there were as many flung stones as sweetmeats, twice as many lean times as good, and as for the drunkards, the gossips, the lechers, the men…Besides, there was Fleur to think of, then as always.

One of my blasphemies-my many, many blasphemies-is the refusal to believe in sin. Conceived in sin, I should have given birth to my daughter in sorrow and contrition; exposed her, perhaps, on a hillside, as our ancestors once abandoned their unwanted young. But Fleur was a joy from the beginning. For her, I wear the red cross of the Bernardines, I work the fields instead of the high rope, I devote my days to a God for whom I have little affection and even less understanding. But with her at my side, this life is far from unpleasant. The cloister at least is safe. I have my garden. My books. My friends. Sixty-five of them, a family larger and closer in some ways than any I ever had.

I told them I was a widow. It seemed the simplest solution. A wealthy young widow, now with child, fleeing persecution from a dead husband’s creditors. Jewelry salvaged from the wreck of my caravan at Épinal gave me what I needed to bargain with. My years in the theater served me well-in any case, I was convincing enough for a provincial abbess who had never ventured out of sight of her native coast. And as time passed I realized my subterfuge was unnecessary. Few of us were impelled by holy vocation. We shared little except a need for privacy, a mistrust of men, an instinctive solidarity, which outweighed differences of upbringing and belief. Each one of us fleeing something we could not quite see. As I said, we all have our secrets.

Soeur Marguerite, scrawny as a skinned rabbit and eternally twitching with nerves and anxieties, comes to me for a tisane to banish dreams in which, she says, a man with fiery hands torments her. I brew her tinctures of chamomile and valerian sweetened with honey, she purges herself daily with salt water and castor oil, but I can see from the feverish look in her eyes that the dreams plague her still.

Then we have Soeur Antoine, plump and red-faced, hands perpetually greasy from her cook pots, mother of a dead child at fourteen. Some say she killed it herself; others blamed her father in his rage and shame. She certainly eats well for all her guilt; her stomach is perpetually swollen beneath the seam of her wimple, her helpless, moony face bracketed by half a dozen quivering chins. She holds her pies and pastries to her bosom like children; difficult to tell, in these shadows, who is feeding whom.

Soeur Alfonsine: white as bone but for the red spot on either cheek, who sometimes coughs blood into her palm and who lives in a state of perpetual exaltation. Someone has told her that the afflicted have special gifts, denied to those who are sound in body. As a result she cultivates an otherworldly air and has seen the devil many times in the form of a great black dog.

And Perette: Soeur Anne to you, but always Perette at heart. The wild girl who never speaks, aged thirteen or a little older, found naked on the seashore a year ago last November. For the first three days she would not eat but sat motionless on the floor of her cell, face turned to the wall. Then came the rages; the smeared excrement, the food flung at the sisters who tended her; the animal cries. She flatly refused to wear the clothes we gave her, strutting naked about the freezing cell, occasionally giving voice to the tongueless hooting sounds that signaled her frenzies, her strange sorrows, her triumphs.

Now, one might almost take her for a normal child. In her novice’s whites she is nearly pretty, singing our hymns in her high wordless voice, but happiest in the garden and the fields, wimple discarded on a bramble bush, skirts flying. She still never speaks. Some wonder if she ever did. Her eyes are gold-ringed, unreadable as a bird’s. Her pale hair, shorn to rid her of lice, has begun to grow back and stands out around her small face. She loves Fleur, often warbling to her in that high birdy voice and making toys for her from the reeds and grasses of the seashore with quick, clever fingers. I too am a special friend, and she often comes with me to the fields, watching me as I work and singing to herself.

Yes, I have a family once again. All refugees in our different ways; Perette, Antoine, Marguerite, Alfonsine, and I; and with us, prim Piété; Bénédicte, the gossip; Tomasine, with the lazy eye; Germaine of the flaxen hair and ruined face; Clémente, the troubling beauty who shares her bed; and senile Rosamonde, closer to God than any of the saner ones, innocent of memory or sin.

Life is simple here-or was. Food is plentiful and good. Our comforts are not denied us-Marguerite her bottle and her daily purges, Antoine her pastries. Mine is Fleur, who sleeps alongside my bed in a cot of her own and comes with me to prayer and fieldwork. A lax regime, some might say, more like a country girls’ outing than a sisterhood brought together in contrition, but this is not the mainland. An island has a life of its own; even Le Devin across the water is another world to us. A priest may come once a year to celebrate mass, and I’m told the last time the bishop visited was twenty years ago, when the old Henri was crowned. Since then, the good king too has been murdered-it was he who declared that each home in France should have a broiled fowl every week, and, thanks to Soeur Antoine, we followed his command with more than religious zeal-his successor a boy not out of shortcoats.

So many changes. I mistrust them; outside in the world there are tides at work that may tear the land apart. Better to be here, with Fleur, while all around us the dissolution rages and above us the birds of malchance gather like clouds.

Here, where it’s safe.

3

An abbey without an abbess. A country without a king. For four days now we have shared France’s restlessness. Louis Dieudonné-the God-given-a fine, strong name for a child brought to the throne beneath the shadow of assassination. As if the name itself might lift the curse and blind the people to the corruptions of Church and Court and the ever-growing ambitions of the Régente Marie. The old king was a soldier, a seasoned man of government. With Henri, we knew where we stood. But this little Louis is only nine years old. Already, barely two months after his father’s death, the rumors have begun: de Sully, the king’s adviser, has been replaced by a favorite of the Médicis woman. The Condés have returned. I need no oracle to foresee uneasy times ahead. Normally, these things do not concern us, here at Noirs Moustiers. But, like France, we need the security of leadership. Like France, we fear the unknown.

Without the Reverend Mother we remain in flux, left to our own devices, while a message is sent to the bishop in Rennes. But our holiday atmosphere is tainted by uncertainty. The corpse lies in the chapel with candles burning and myrrh in a censer, for it is high summer and the air is foul and ripe. We hear nothing from the mainland, but we know the journey to Rennes should take four days at least. Meanwhile, we drift anchorless. And we need our anchor: the laxity of our former regime has become stretched still further until it is shapeless and without meaning. We barely worship. Duties are forgotten. Each nun turns to what gives her most comfort, Antoine to food, Marguerite to drink, Alfonsine to the scrubbing of the cloisters over and over on her knees until her skin breaks and she has to be carried to her cell with the scrubbing brush still clutched in her trembling hand. Some weep without knowing why. Some have sought out the players, who have remained in the village, two miles away. I heard them coming back late to the dorter last night and caught laughter and a hot reek of wine and sex from the opened window.

Outwardly, little has changed. I carry on much as usual. I tend my herbs; I write my journal, I walk to the harbor with Fleur, I change the candles by the poor corpse in the chapel. This morning I said a prayer of my own, without recourse to the gilded saints in their niches, alone and in silence. But the trouble within me grows daily. I have not forgotten my premonition on the day of the players.

Last night in the silence of my cubicle, I read the cards. But there was no comfort for me there. As Fleur slept, heedless, in her cot at my bedside, again and again I drew the same combination. The Tower. The Hermit. Death. And my dreams were uneasy.

4

The Abbey of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer stands in a piece of reclaimed marshland some two miles from the sea. To the left, marshes that flood regularly in winter, bringing the brackish waters less than a stone’s throw from our doorway and occasionally seeping through into the cellarium where our food is stored. To the right, the road leading into town, where carts and horses pass and every Thursday a procession of vendors moving from one market to another with their assortments of cloths, baskets, leather, and foodstuffs. It is an old abbey, founded some two hundred years ago by a community of black friars and paid for in the only true coin the Church accepts: the fear of damnation.

In those days of indulgences and corruption a noble family ensured its succession to the Kingdom by giving its name to an abbey; but the friars were dogged by misfortune from the start. Plague wiped them out sixty years after the abbey’s completion, and the buildings were abandoned until two generations later, when the Bernardines took them over.

There must have been far more of them than there are of us, however, for the abbey could house twice as many as we have here, but time and the weather have done their work on the once-fine architecture.

Yet there must have been wealth enough lavished upon it once, for there is good marble flooring in the church and the one unbroken window is of marvelous design, but since then, the winds across the flats have eroded the stone and tumbled arches on the west side so that in that wing, barely any of the remaining buildings are habitable. On the east side we still have the dorter, the cloister, infirmary, and warming room, but the lay quarters are a shambles, with so many tiles missing from the roof that birds have taken to nesting there. The scriptorium, too, is in sad disrepair, although so few of our number can read, and we have so few books, in any case, that it hardly matters. A chaos of smaller buildings, mostly of wood, has sprung up around the church and the cloister; bakehouse, tannery, barns, and a smokehouse for drying fish, so that instead of the grandiose place of the black friars’ intention the abbey now appears more like a rough shantytown.

The lay folk do much of the common work. It is a privilege they pay for in goods and services as well as tithes, and we repay our side of the bargain in prayers and indulgences. Sainte Marie-de-la-mer herself is a stone effigy, now standing at the church doorway on a pedestal of rough sandstone. She was discovered ninety years ago in the marshes, by a boy searching for a lost sheep: a three-foot lump of blackened basalt crudely carved into the semblance of a woman. Her breasts are bare and her tapering feet are tucked beneath a long featureless robe, which in the old days led folk to call her the Mermaid.

Since her discovery and laborious transportation into the abbey grounds, forty years ago, there have been several miraculous healings of folk who have appealed to her, and she is popular among fishermen, who often pray to Marie-de-la-mer for protection from storms.

For myself, I think she looks very old. Not a Virgin but a crone, head lowered in weariness, her bowed shoulders glazed from almost a century of reverent handling. Her sagging breasts, too, are noticeably burnished. Barren women, or those wishing to conceive, still touch them for luck as they pass, paying for the blessing with a fowl, a cask of wine, or a basket of fish.

And yet in spite of the reverence shown by these islanders, she has little in common with the Holy Mother. She is too ancient, to begin with. Older than the abbey itself, the basalt looks as if it might be a thousand years old or more, speckled with shards of mica like fragments of bone. And there is nothing to prove that the figure was ever supposed to represent the Holy Mother. Indeed, her bared breasts seem strangely immodest, like those of some pagan deity of long ago. Some of the locals still call her by the old name-though her miracles should long since have established her identity as well as her holiness. But fisherfolk are a superstitious lot. We coexist with them, but we remain as alien to them as were the black friars of old, a race apart, to be placated with tithes and gifts.

The Abbey of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer was an ideal retreat for me. Old as it is, isolated and in disrepair, it is the safest haven I have ever known. Far enough from the mainland, the only Church official a parish priest who could barely read Latin himself, I found myself in a position as humorous as it was absurd. I began as a lay sister, one of only a dozen. But out of sixty-five sisters, barely half could read at all; less than a tenth knew any Latin. I began by reading at Chapter. Then I was included in the services, my daily tasks reduced to allow me to read from the big old Bible on the lectern. Then Reverend Mother approached me with unusual-almost timid-reserve.

The novices, you understand…We had twelve, aged thirteen to eighteen. It was unseemly for them-for any of us-to be so ignorant. If I could teach them-just a little. We had books hidden away in the old scriptorium, which few were able to study. If I could only show them what to do…

I understood quickly enough. Our Reverend Mother, kind as she was, practical as she was in her shrewd, simple fashion, had kept a secret from us. Had hidden it for fifty years or more, learning long passages from the Bible by heart to conceal her ignorance, feigning weak eyesight in order to avoid the ordeal. Reverend Mother could not read Latin. Could not, I suspected, read at all.

She supervised my lessons to the novices with care, standing at the back of the refectory-our improvised schoolroom-with head to one side, as if she understood every word. I never referred to her deficiency in private or in public, deferring to her on minor points upon which I had previously briefed her, and she showed her gratitude in small, secret ways.

After a year I took vows at her request, and my new status permitted me to take full participation in all aspects of abbey life.

Good Mère Marie, I miss her. Her faith was as simple and honest as the land she worked. She rarely punished-not that there was much to punish in any case-seeing sin as proof of unhappiness. If a sister offended, she spoke to her kindly, repaying the transgression with its opposite; for theft, gifts: for laziness, respite from daily tasks. Few failed to be shamed by her unfailing generosity. And yet she was a heretic like myself. Her faith skated perilously close to the pantheism against which Giordano, my old teacher, used to warn me. And yet it was sincere. Careless of the more complex theological issues, her philosophy could be summed up in a single word: love. For Mère Marie, love overrode everything.

Love not often, but forever. It’s one of my mother’s sayings, and all my life it has been the story of my heart. Before I came to the abbey I thought I understood. Love for my mother; love for my friends; the dark and complex love of a woman for a man. But when Fleur was born, everything changed. A man who has never seen it may think he understands the ocean; but he thinks only of what he knows; imagines a large body of water, bigger than a millpond; bigger than a lake. The reality, however, is beyond imagining: the scents, the sounds, the anguish, and the joy of it beyond any comparison with previous experience. That was Fleur. Never, since my thirteenth summer had there been such an awakening. From the first instant, when Mère Marie gave her to me to suckle, I knew that the world had changed. I had been alone and had never known it; had traveled, fought, suffered, danced, fornicated, loved, hated, grieved, and triumphed all alone, living like an animal from day to day, caring for nothing; desiring nothing; fearing nothing. Suddenly now everything was different: Fleur was in the world. I was a mother.

It is a perilous joy, however. I knew, of course, that children often died young-I had seen it happen many times on my travels, of sickness, accident or hunger-but I had never before imagined the pain of it, or the terrible loss. Now I am afraid of everything; the reckless Ailée, who danced on the rope and flew the high trapeze, has become a timid creature, a clucking hen; clinging to safety for the sake of her child, where once she would have ached for adventure. LeMerle, the eternal gamester, would have scorned that weakness. Stake nothing that you would not lose. And yet I can pity him, wherever he is. His world has no oceans.

This morning, Prime was barely observed: Matins and Lauds, not at all. I am alone in the church as dawn breaks, a milky light brimming through the roof above the pulpitum, where the slates are fewest. A thin rain is falling and the overspill chimes a little three-note scale against the broken gutter. We sold most of the lead the year we built the bakehouse; exchanged bad stone for good metal, bread for the heart of the South Transept, the belly for the soul. We replaced the lead by clay and plaster mortar, but only lead lasts.

Sainte Marie-de-la-mer looks down with round expressionless eyes. Her other features are blunted with time; a huge stone woman, squatting effortfully as do the gypsies in childbirth. I can hear the sea borne across the flats and the cries of birds through the open door. Gulls, no doubt. There are no black birds here. I wonder if Mère Marie can see me now. I wonder if the saint hears my silent prayer.

Perhaps it is only the shriek of the seagulls that makes me uneasy. Perhaps the scent of freedom sweeping across the flats.

There are no blackbirds here.

But it is too late. Once invoked, my incubus is not so easily banished. His image seems tattooed across my eyelids so that, open or closed, I see him. I feel that I have never ceased to see him, my Black Bird of misfortune: awake or asleep, he has never been truly out of mind. Five years of peace was more than I expected-more, perhaps, than I deserved. But everything returns, as the islanders say. And the past rushes in like the tide.

5

My earliest memory was of our caravan, which was painted orange with a tiger on one side and a pastoral scene with lambs and shepherdesses on the other. When I was good I played opposite the lambs. When I was disobedient I was given the tiger for company. Secretly I loved the tiger best.

Born into a family of gypsies, I had many mothers, many fathers, many homes. There was Isabelle, my true mother, strong and tall and beautiful. There was Gabriel the acrobat, and Princess Farandole, who had no arms and used her toes as if they were fingers; dark-eyed Janette, who told fortunes, the cards flickering like flames between her clever old hands; and there was Giordano, a Jew from southern Italy, who could read and write. Not just French, but Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He was no relation of mine as far as I knew, but he cared for me best of all-loved me, in his pedantic way. The gypsies named me Juliette; I had no other name, nor did I need one.

It was Giordano who taught me my letters, reading to me from the books that he kept in a secret compartment in the body of the caravan. It was he who told me about Copernicus, taught me that the Nine Heavens do not revolve around the earth, but that the earth and planets circle the sun. There was more, not all of which I understood, about the properties of metals and the elements. He showed me how to make black burning-powder with a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal and how to light it using a length of twine. The others nicknamed him Le Philosophe and made merry of his books and his experiments, but from him I learned to read, to watch the stars, and to mistrust the Church.

From Gabriel I learned to juggle, to turn somersaults, to dance on the rope. From Janette, the cards, bones, and the use of plants and herbs. From Farandole, pride and self-reliance. From my mother, the lore of colors, the speech of birds, and the cantrips to keep evil at bay. Elsewhere, I learned to pick pockets and to handle a knife, to use my fists in a fight or to flick my hips at a drunken man on a street corner and to lure him into shadows where eager hands waited to strip him of purse and poke.

We toured the coastal cities and towns, never staying in one place long enough to attract unwelcome attention. We were often hungry, shunned by all but the poorest and the most desperate, denounced from pulpits across the country and blamed for every misfortune from drought to apple rot, but we took our happiness where we could, and we all helped one another according to our skills.

When I was fourteen we scattered, our caravans burnt by zealots in Flanders amid accusations of theft and sorcery. Giordano fled south; Gabriel made for the border; and my mother left me in the care of a little group of Carmelites, promising to return for me when the danger was past. I stayed there for almost eight weeks. The sisters were kind, but poor-almost as poor as we ourselves had been-and they were for the most part frightened old women, unable to face the world outside their order. I hated it; I missed my mother and my friends; I missed Giordano and his books; most of all I missed the freedom of the roads. No word had come from Isabelle, for good or for ill. My cards showed me nothing but a confusion of cups and swords; I itched from the crown of my cropped head to the soles of my feet, and I longed more than anything to be away from the smell of old women. One night I ran away, walked the six miles into Flanders and lay low for a couple of weeks, living on scraps, hoping to hear news of our company. But by then the trail was cold; talk of war had eclipsed everything else, and few people remembered one group of gypsies among all the rest. In despair I returned to the convent, but found it shut, and a plague sign on the door. Well, that was the end of it. With or without Isabelle, I no longer had a choice; I had to move on.

And so it was that I found myself alone and destitute, living perilously and poorly from theft and scavenging as I made my way toward the capital. For a time I traveled with a group of Italian performers, where I learned their tongue and the rudiments of the commedia dell‘-arte. But the Italianate trend was already losing its popularity. For two years we lived indifferently until my comrades, discouraged and homesick for the orange groves and the warm blue mountains of their native land, decided to return home. I would have followed them. But maybe it was my demon prompted me to remain, or maybe the need to stay on the move. I made my farewells and, alone, though with money enough now for my needs, I turned my face again toward Paris.

It was there that I first met the Blackbird. Named LeMerle for the color of his unpowdered hair, he was a firebrand among the languid gentlemen of the Court, never at rest, never quite in disfavor, but always on the brink of social disgrace. He was unremarkable to look at, preferring unadorned clothing and the simplest of jewelry, but his eyes were as full of light and shadow as trees in a forest, and his smile was the most engaging I had ever seen, the smile of a man who finds his world delightful, but absurd. Everything was a game to him. He was indifferent to matters of rank or status. He lived on perpetual credit and never went to church.

It was a carelessness to which I responded eagerly, seeing in it some reflection of myself; but we were nothing alike, he and I. I was a little savage of sixteen; LeMerle was ten years older; perverse; irreverent; irrepressible. Naturally, I fell in love.

A chick, hatching from the egg, will take as its mother the first object that moves. LeMerle pulled me from the street, gave me a position; most of all he gave me back my pride. Of course I loved him, and with the unquestioning adoration of the new-hatched chick. Love not often, but forever. More fool me.

He had a troupe of player-dancers, the Théâtre du Flambeau, under the protectorship of Maximilien de Béthune, later to become the Duc de Sully, who was an admirer of the ballet. Other performances too could be arranged, these not so public, and unsponsored-though not unattended-by the Court. LeMerle trod a discreet, perilous line of blackmail and intrigue, skating the parameters of fashionable society without ever quite falling to the lures cast to him there. Though no one seemed to know his real name I took him for a nobleman-certainly he was acknowledged by most. His Ballet des Gueux had been an immediate success, though condemned by some as impious. Unabashed by critics, he was so audacious as to include members of the Court in his Ballet du Grand Pastoral-with the Duc de Cramail dressed as a woman-and was planning even as I joined his troupe the Ballet Travesti, which was to prove the final straw with his respectable patron.

It flattered him at first, to have me at his feet; and it amused him to see how hungrily men watched me as I danced onstage. We performed, LeMerle’s troupe and I, in salons and theaters all over the city. By then, comédie-ballets were becoming fashionable-popular romances from classical themes, interspersed with long interludes of dance and acrobatics. LeMerle wrote the dialogue and choreographed the routines-adapting the script to allow for the tastes of each audience. There were heroic speeches for the dress circle; flimsily clad dancers for the ballet enthusiasts, and dwarves, tumblers, and clowns for the general public, who would otherwise have become restless, and who greeted our act with loud cheers and laughter.

Paris-and LeMerle-had improved me almost beyond recognition; my hair was clean and glossy, my skin glowed, and for the first time in my life I wore silks and velvets, lace and fur; I danced in slippers embroidered with gold; I hid my smiles behind fans of ivory and chicken skin. I was young; intoxicated, to be sure, by my new life; but Isabelle’s daughter was not to be blinded by frills and fripperies. No, it was love that blinded me, and when our ship of dreams struck aground, it was love that kept me at his side.

The Blackbird’s fall from grace was as abrupt as his ascendancy. I was never quite sure how it happened; one day our Ballet Travesti was all the rage, and then the next, disaster struck; de Béthune’s protectorship withdrawn overnight, players and dancers scattered. Creditors who had held back now moved in like flies. All at once, the name of Guy LeMerle was no longer spoken; “friends” were suddenly never at home. Finally, LeMerle narrowly escaped a beating at the hands of lackeys sent by the famously austere Bishop of Évreux and fled Paris in haste, having called in the few favors still outstanding and taking with him what wealth he could. I followed. Call it what you will. He was a plausible rogue, with ten years more experience than I, and with a fine coat of Court polish over his villainy. I followed; it was inevitable. I would have followed him to hell.

He was quick to adapt to the traveler’s life. So quick, in fact, that I wondered to what extent he was not, like myself, a soldier of fortune. I had expected him to be humiliated by his disgrace: at the very least, a little chastened. He was neither. From Court gentleman he transformed overnight to itinerant performer, shedding his silk for a journeyman’s leathers. He acquired an accent midway between the refined speech of the city and the provinces’ rough burr, changing weekly to suit whichever particular province we happened to be visiting.

I realized that he was enjoying himself; that the whole game-for this is how he recalled our flight from Paris-had excited him. He had escaped the city unharmed, having caused a series of impressive scandals. He had insulted a satisfactory number of influential people. Above all, I understood, he had goaded the Bishop of Evreux-a man of legendary self-control-into an undignified response; and as far as LeMerle was concerned, that alone was a significant victory. As a result, far from being in any way humbled, he remained as irrepressible as ever, and almost at once set about the plans for his next venture.

Of our original troupe only seven now remained, including myself. Two dancers-Ghislaine, a country girl from Lorraine, and Hermine, a courtesan past her prime-with four dwarves, Rico, Bazuel, Cateau, and Le Borgne. Dwarves come in many shapes: Rico and Cateau were of childlike build, with small heads and piping voices; Bazuel was plump and cherubic; and Le Borgne, who had only one eye, was of normal proportions, with a sound chest and strong, well-muscled arms-or would have been, but for his absurdly short-ended legs. He was a strange and bitter little half-man, fiercely contemptuous of the Tall People, as he called us, but for some reason he tolerated me-perhaps because I did not pity him-and he had a grudging respect-if not a genuine liking-for LeMerle.

“In my grandfather’s day it was worth your while to be a dwarf,” he would often grumble. “You’d never be short of food, at least; you could always join a circus or a traveling troupe. And as for the Church-”

Church people had changed since his grandfather’s day. Nowadays there was suspicion where once there might have been pity, with everyone trying to find someone to blame for their bad times and misfortune. A dwarf or a cripple was always fair game, said Le Borgne: and such undesirables as gypsies and performers made good scapegoats.

“There was a time,” he said, “when every troupe had a dwarf or an idiot, for luck. Holy fools, they called us. God’s innocents. Nowadays they’re just as likely to throw stones as to spare a crust for a poor unfortunate. There’s no virtue in it anymore. And as for LeMerle and his comédie-ballets-well!” He grinned savagely. “Laughter sits poorly on an empty stomach. Come winter, he’ll know that with the rest of us.”

Be that as it may, in the weeks that followed, we attracted three more players, members of a disbanded troupe in Aix. Caboche was a flautist, Demiselle a reasonable dancer, and Bouffon a onetime clown lately turned pickpocket. We traveled under the name of Théâtre du Grand Carnaval, performing mostly burlesque plays and short ballets, with tumbling and juggling from the dwarves, but though the entertainments were well received, they were for the most part indifferently paid, and for a while our purses were thin.

It was nearing harvesttime, and for some weeks we would arrive at a village in the morning, earn a little money helping a local farmer mow the hay or pick fruit, then in the evening we would perform in the courtyard of the nearest alehouse for what coins we could glean. At first LeMerle’s soft hands bled from the fieldwork, but he did not complain. I moved into his caravan wordlessly one night, he accepting my presence without surprise or comment, as if I were his due.

He was a strange lover. Aloof, cautious, abstracted, as silent in passion as an incubus. Women found him attractive, but he seemed mostly indifferent to their advances. This was not from any loyalty to me. He was simply a man who, already having one coat, sees no reason to go to the trouble of buying another. Later I saw him for what he was: selfish; shallow; cruel. But for a time I was taken in; and, hungry for affection, was content-for a time-with such small scraps as he was able to give me.

In exchange, I shared with him what I could. I showed him how to trap thrushes and rabbits when food was scarce. I showed him herbs to cure fevers and heal wounds. I taught him my mother’s cantrips; I even repeated some of Giordano’s teachings, and in that especially, LeMerle showed a keen interest.

In fact, I told him more about myself than I had intended-much more, indeed, than was safe. But he was clever, and charming, and I was flattered at his attention. Much of what I said was heretical, a mixture of gypsy lore and Giordano’s teachings. An earth-planets-moving about a central sun. A Goddess of grain and pleasure, older than the Church, her people unfettered by sin or contrition. Men and women as equals-at this he smiled, for it was beyond outrageous-but knew better than to comment. I assumed, in the years that passed, that he had forgotten. Only much later did I realize that with Guy LeMerle nothing is forgotten; everything is set aside for the winter, every scrap of information added to his store. I was a fool. I make no apologies. And in spite of what happened I’ll swear he had begun to care for me a little. Enough to cost him a pang or two. But not enough for me, when the time came. Not nearly enough.

I never learned his true name. He hinted it was a noble one-certainly he was not of the people-although even at the height of my infatuation I believed less than half of what he told me. He had been an actor and a playwright, he said; a poet in the style of the classics; spoke of misfortune, of ruin; grew elated at the memory of thronged theaters.

That he had been an actor I did not doubt. He had the gift of mimicry, a broad and winning smile, a certain flourish in his way of walking, of carrying his head, which spoke of the stage. His skills served him well-be it selling fake cures or bartering a winded horse, his powers of persuasion were little short of magical. But he had not begun his career as a performer. He must have studied; he could read Latin and Greek, and was familiar with several of Giordano’s philosophers. He could ride a horse as well as any circus equestrienne. He could pick pockets like a professional, and he excelled at all games of chance. He seemed able to adapt to any circumstance, acquiring new skills as he went, and however much I tried, I was unable to pierce the layers of fiction, fancy, and outright lies with which he surrounded himself. His secrets, whatever they were, remained his own.

There was one thing, however. An old brand high up on his left arm, a fleur-de-lis faded almost to silver over the years-which, when I questioned him, he dismissed with a smile and a claim of forgetfulness. But I noticed that he took care always to cover the mark after that, and I drew my own conclusions. My Blackbird had lost feathers in that encounter and did not care to be reminded of it.

6

I have never believed in God. Not in your God anyway; the one who looks down onto his chessboard and moves the pieces according to his pleasure, occasionally glancing up at the face of his Adversary with the smile of one who already knows the outcome. It seems to me that there must be something horribly flawed in a Creator who persists in testing his creatures to destruction, in providing a world well stocked with pleasures only to announce that all pleasure is sin, in creating mankind imperfect, then expecting us to aspire to perfection. The devil at least plays fair. We know where he stands. But even he, the Lord of Deceit, works for the Almighty in secret. Like master, like man.

Giordano called me pagan. To him this was no compliment, for he was a devout Jew, believing in a heavenly reward for his earthly sufferings. To him, to be pagan was to be immoral, ungodly, to indulge freely in the pleasures of the flesh, to delight too frequently in the other hazards encountered on the road. My old teacher ate sparingly, fasted regularly, prayed often, immersing himself for the rest of the time in his studies. He was a good companion-our only grievance was that on his Sabbath he refused to help with the work around the camp, preferring to go without a fire, even on a winter’s night, than to take the trouble to light one. Apart from this peculiarity, he was just like the rest of us; and I never saw him eat the flesh of children, as the Church claims his people do. In fact he rarely ate any kind of flesh at all. Which simply goes to show how misguided the Church can be.

Perhaps Giordano was misguided too, I told myself, as I strove dutifully to be more like my mentor. His Jewish God seemed so very like the Catholic God-which One True Religion seemed to me almost indistinguishable from that of the Huguenots or the Protestant heretics in England. There must be something else, I told myself repeatedly; something beyond sin and solemnity, dust and devotions; something that loved life as indiscriminately as I did.

My thirteenth birthday brought a kind of awakening. All that summer was a languorous procession of delights: a new awareness, a boundless energy, a heightened sense of taste and smell. For the first time, or so it seemed, I really noticed the flowers along the roadside; the scent of night falling by the seashore; the taste of my mother’s new bread, baked black in the coals but tender inside the crust of ash. I noticed too the delicious friction of my clothes against my skin, the icy splash of stream water as I bathed…If this was to be pagan, then I wanted more of it. The world had become maternal almost overnight, and her mysteries were boundless. I opened myself to her initiations. Every shoot, every flower, tree, bird, creature filled me with tenderness and joy. I lost my maidenhead to a fisherman in Le Havre and the world exploded in a revelation no less momentous to me than that of Saint John.

Giordano shook his head sourly and called me shameless. For a while he taught me nothing but theology so that my head spun and I rebelled, demanding the return of my history lessons, my astronomy, my Latin, my poetry. For a while he resisted me. I was a savage, he told me with disapproval, little better than the natives of newly discovered Quebec. I stole his books and pored over Latin erotica, my fingers following the script with agonizing slowness. When winter came my senses froze and my teacher forgave me, resuming our studies with his habitual sour shake of the head. But secretly, pagan I remained. Even in the abbey I am happier in the fields than in the chapel, the burn of my working muscles a kind of remembrance of that summer when I was thirteen and ungodly.

Today I worked until my back ached. When no more could be done among the herbs and vegetables, I moved to the salt flats, regardless of the sun’s glare, my skirt kilted to my knees, ankles mired in rime and mud. At the abbey we have lay folk to do the heavy work, the fishing, slaughtering of cattle, curing of leathers, and work in the salt fields, but I’ve never been shy of hard labor, and it keeps the fear at bay.

There is no word yet from Rennes, and last night my dreams were terrible, a nightmare hand of flung cards with LeMerle’s face on every one. I wonder whether I have brought these visions upon myself by writing so much about him in my journal, but the tale, now begun, is a runaway colt beneath my hands. Hopeless to try to break it now; better to hang on and let it run itself to exhaustion.

Janette taught me to value my dreams. They are like waves, she told me, of the tides that bear us, from which strange jetsam may be gathered, strange eddies from the deeps for those to read who can. I must use my dreams, not fear them. Only a fool fears knowledge.

Our first winter was the worst. For two months the Théâtre du Grand Carnaval was forced to a standstill just outside Vitré, a small town on the Vilaine. It had snowed throughout December, our money was almost gone, our food was running low, one of our caravans had lost a wheel, and there could be no hope of moving on until spring.

I think we all took it for granted that LeMerle would not beg. He was, he told us, writing a tragedy which, when performed, would prove to be the solution to all our problems. Meanwhile we scavenged, scrounged, danced, juggled, and tumbled ankle deep in the frozen refuse of the streets. The girls earned more than the men-at times we rivaled even the dwarves, once their novelty had worn off. Le Borgne grumbled, as ever, and seemed to take this as a personal affront. LeMerle accepted what money we brought him as if he expected no less.

One day, as January thawed to rain and mud, a fine carriage swept past our camp and beyond toward the town, and later LeMerle gathered us together and told us to prepare ourselves for a special performance at the castle. We arrived freshly bathed and in the dancers’ costumes we had salvaged in our flight from Paris, to find half a dozen gentlemen assembled in the large dining hall, where a game seemed to be under way. There were cards on the table, and I caught the glint of gold in the candlelight. There was a scent of mulled wine and woodsmoke and tobacco, and LeMerle was sitting in their midst in his Court finery, a cup of punch in one hand. He seemed on excellent terms with the little company: we might almost have been in Paris again. I sensed danger, and knew that LeMerle sensed it too. But he was clearly enjoying himself.

A plump young gentleman in rose-colored silk leaned forward and peered at me through a lorgnette. “But she’s charming,” he said. “Come closer, my dear. I don’t bite.”

I moved forward, my satin shoes whispering over the polished floorboards, and made my courtesy. “My card, sweetheart. Come on, take it; don’t be shy.”

I was feeling vaguely uncomfortable. I had grown since we left Paris, and my skirt was shorter, my bodice tighter than I remembered. I regretted now not taking the time to make the necessary adjustments. The rose-pink gentleman smirked and handed me a playing card between finger and thumb. I saw that it was the queen of hearts.

LeMerle winked at me and I was reassured. If this was one of his games, I thought, then I could play it with the best of them; certainly it looked as though the others were familiar with the rules. The three of spades fell to Hermine, to Cateau the jack of clubs, and to Demiselle the ace of diamonds until at last each of us had been given the name of a playing card-even the dwarves-and this to ribald laughter, though I was far from understanding why. We danced then; first some comic acrobatics and then a simplified version of the Ballet des Gueux-the Beggars’ Ballet, which had earned such a success at Court.

From time to time I was aware as I danced of playing cards being tossed into the center of the table, but the dance was a strenuous one and my attention could not be spared. It was only when it came to an end, and four winners rose to claim their prizes, that I realized the purpose of the game-and the stakes. Comic cursing from the losers, who were left with the dwarves. As I was led up the broad stairway toward the bedchambers, feeling trapped and stupid, I heard LeMerle behind me calmly suggesting a rubber of piquet.

I half turned at the sound of his voice. Hermine caught my eye and frowned-she alone of the four dancers understood what was going on. In the golden light from the sconce I thought she looked old, her painted cheekbones shining with grease. Her eyes were hard and blue and very patient. Their expression told me everything I needed to know.

The rose-pink gentleman seemed to notice my hesitation. “Fair’s fair, sweetheart,” he said. “I won, didn’t I?”

LeMerle knew I was watching him. He’d gambled on my reaction as well as on the turn of the card, and for a second I was an unknown quantity to him, a thing of passing interest. Then he turned away, already intent upon the new game, and I hated him. Oh, not for the brief moment of inconvenience on the couch. I’d had worse; and the lordling was quickly spent. No, it was the game, as if I, and the others, had been nothing more to him than the cards in his hand, to be played or set aside as the game dictated.

Of course, I would forgive him. “But Juliette, do you think I wanted to do it? I did it for you. For all of you. Do you think I would have let you starve to safeguard my own delicacy?”

I had taken out my knife, its dark blade sharpened to a sliver. My fingers throbbed with the urge to bleed him. “It didn’t have to be that way,” I said. “If only you’d told me-” It was true; if he had told me of his plans I would have accepted: for his sake.

His eyes fixed mine and I saw the knowledge there. “You could have refused,” he said. “I wouldn’t have forced you, Juliette.”

“You sold us.” My voice was trembling. “You tricked us and you sold us for money!” He knew I could not have refused. If we had withheld our favors that night it would have been to see LeMerle in the pillory-or worse-the following morning. “You used us, Guy. You used me.”

I could see him measuring the situation. I was a little overwrought, but my anger wouldn’t last. It wasn’t as if I were a virgin, after all. Nothing was really lost. Gold clinked between his fingers. “Juliette, listen to me-”

It was the wrong time for cajolery. As he reached out toward me I slashed at him with the knife. I only meant to keep him at a distance, but my movement was too quick for him to evade and my blade sliced cruelly across his outstretched palms.

“Next time, LeMerle.” I was shaking, but the knife was steady. “Next time I’ll take your face right off.”

Any other man would have glanced at his wounded hands-instinct demands it-but not LeMerle. There was no fear at all in his eyes, no pain. Instead, there was surprise, fascination, delight, as if at some unexpected discovery. It was a look I had seen on his face before, at the card table, or in front of an angry mob, or flushed with triumph in the gleam of the footlights. I held his gaze defiantly. Blood dripped from his fists onto the ground between us, and neither of us looked down.

“Why, sweetheart,” he said. “I believe you would.”

“Try me.”

Now blood was the only color about him; against his black coat, his face was ash. He took a step toward me and stumbled; without thinking, I caught him as he collapsed. “You’re right, Juliette,” he said. “I should have told you.”

That disarmed me, as he had known it would. Then, still smiling, he passed out.

I bandaged his hands myself with betony and fresh linen. Then I found him brandy and stood over him while he drank it, mentally replaying the scene as I did so until it seemed to me almost as if he had sacrificed himself for us instead of the other way around. The greatest risk had been his, of course. Besides the gold paid for the performance-public and private-LeMerle fleeced the young cardplayers with shameless expertise whilst Bouffon and Le Borgne searched the house for valuables, standing up fully five hundred livres richer than when he arrived.

When his victims finally understood the imposture he had perpetrated upon them, it was too late. The troupe had already left town, although reports and rumors of LeMerle’s deception followed us all the way to La Rochelle and beyond. It was the beginning of a long chain of impostures and deceits, and for the next six months we traveled under many colors, many names. Our notoriety dogged us for longer than we had expected, but in spite of the risks and the continued efforts for our capture, we felt little anxiety. LeMerle had begun to take on an almost supernatural character in our minds. He seemed invulnerable-and so, by association, were we all. If they had caught him, they would certainly have hanged him, and probably the rest of us for good measure. But traveling players were not uncommon in the West, and we were now the Théâtre de la Poule au Pot, a group of jongleurs from Aquitaine. As far as anyone could tell, the Théâtre du Grand Carnaval had vanished into smoke. And so we escaped from the encounter-and others of the same kind-and I forgave LeMerle for a time, because I was young, and because I believed in those innocent days that there was good in everyone, and that one day, perhaps even he could be redeemed.

It has been more than five years since I saw him last. Too long, to be sure, for me to be so deeply troubled at these long-ago recollections. He may even be dead by now-after Épinal, there’s reason enough to believe it. But I do not. All these years I have dragged the memory and the pain of him behind me like a dog with a stone tied to its tail, and I would know if I were free of him.

Today we must bury the Reverend Mother. It has to be today. The sky is pitiless in its clarity, promising wide blue spaces, scorching sun. No one wants to take responsibility, I know; but the corpse in the chapel is already overripe, liquefying in its bath of spices. No one wants to bury her before her successor arrives. But someone has to make the decision. And it has to be today.

I have not slept since yesterday night. My herbs are no comfort: neither geranium nor rosemary brings me any respite, and lavender fails to clear my head. Belladonna, brewed strong, might show me something worth seeing, but I have had enough of visions for the present. What I need is rest. From the high window I can see the first sliver of dawn as it opens up the sky like an oyster. Fleur sleeps beside me, her doll tucked under her arm and a thumb lodged comfortingly in her mouth, but for me, in spite of my exhaustion, sleep is a distant land. I put out my hand to touch her. I do this often, for my own comfort as well as hers, and she responds sleepily, curling into the half circle of my body with a blurry sigh. She smells of biscuit and warm bread dough. I put my nose into the baby hair at the nape of her neck, which is sweetness and joy and now a kind of anguish, as if at the anticipation of some unimaginable future loss.

Arms around my daughter, I close my eyes again. But my peace is gone. Five years of peace dispelled like smoke in an instant-and for what? A bird, a memory, a glimpse of something from the corner of my eye? And yet the Reverend Mother died. What of it? She was old. Her life was over. There is no reason to believe that he is in any way linked to this. And yet, Giordano taught me that all life is linked; that all terrestrial things are made from the same elemental clay; man, woman, stone, water, tree, bird. It was heresy. But Giordano believed it. One day he would find it, he told me; the philosopher’s stone, which would prove his theory right; the recipe for all matter, the elixir of the Nine Worlds. Everything is linked; the world is in motion around the sun; everything returns, and every act, however small, has a thousand repercussions. I can feel them now, coming at me like ripples from a stone flung into a lake.

And the Blackbird? We too are linked, he and I; I need no philosophy to tell me that. Well, let him come. If he has a part to play, let him play it soon, and quickly; because if ever I see him again in the flesh, he knows that this time, I will kill him.

7

We buried her in the herb garden. It was a quiet affair-I planted lavender and rosemary to sweeten her body’s corruption and everyone said a little prayer. We sang the Kyrie Eleison, but badly, for some were overcome with grief. This outpouring surprises me-more than a dozen sisters have died since my arrival here, some of them young, and not one was mourned with such fierce despair-and yet it should not. We have lost more than one of our own. Even the murder of King Henri in Paris, only two months ago, had less impact on our lives.

That being so, it seems wrong to bury her with such little ceremony. She should have had a priest: a proper service. But we could wait no longer; the news from Rennes is slow in coming, and corruption spreads fastest in summer, bringing disease. Most of the sisters have no idea of this, preferring to trust to the power of prayer; but a lifetime on the roads has taught me the value of caution. There may well be demons, my mother used to say, but foul water, bad meat, and tainted air are the real killers, and her wisdom has served me well.

Anyway, I talked them round to my way of thinking in the end. I always do; and besides, this simple burial was what the Reverend Mother would have wanted: no stone vaulting, but a linen sheet already marbled with mold, then the raw white earth, upon which our potatoes thrive so sweetly.

Perhaps I’ll plant potatoes above her grave, their flesh mingling with hers in the soil so that every joint nurtures a tuber, every bone a shoot, the salt of her flesh combining with the salt earth to nurse the roots to pallid life. A pagan thought, strangely lacking in solemnity in this place of mournful secrets. And yet my gods have never been theirs. The master of the world is surely not this stern, stony face, this pointless sacrifice, this life without joy, this endless fixation upon sin…Better to nourish potatoes than fleshless heaven, hopeless hell. But still word does not come.

Nine days. The Creation of the world took less time. Our world remains in limbo, suspended in the clear indifference of these summer days, a rose under glass. And yet the world outside moves on without us; growth, decay, life, death moving on at their usual pace, tide in, tide out, as if God has his own agenda. The scent of the sea blows through the window, already tinted with shades of autumn; the leaves bleached gray by the sun, the grass burnt blond. The land is an anvil for summer’s strike, flat and shimmering.

At least I have my work in the salt field, the wooden ételle in my hands skimming the crust of rime from the mud onto the heap by my side. It is simple work, requiring little thought, and I can watch Fleur and Perette playing nearby, splashing noisily through the warm brown water. These days in the fields-such a burden to the others-are my secret pleasure, with the sun on my back and my daughter at my side. Here I can be myself again, or as much of myself as I care to recall. I can smell the sea, the hot reek of the salt flat, feel the sharp wind coming over from the west, hear the birds. I am not one of these soft sisters, hiding in their darkness for fear of the world. Nor am I an ecstatic like Soeur Alfonsine, driving my poor flesh into a passion of mortification. No, the work pleases me. The long muscles in my thighs tense and stretch, I feel the tautening of my biceps like oiled rope. My arms are bare; my skirt hitched up to the waist, my wimple discarded on the mud bank.

Other than Fleur, my hair is my only extravagance. I cut it when I arrived at the abbey, but it has grown back, thick and red as a fox’s brush and gleaming. It is my only beauty. Otherwise I am too tall, too hard, my skin burnt brown by the sun of many summer roads. If Lazarillo had seen my hair, then he might have remembered me. But one wimple is very like another. Here in the fields, I can discard the coiffe. There is no one to see my unbound hair or my strong bare shoulders. I can be myself; and although I know I can never be l’Ailée again, for a short time I can at least be Juliette.

For six more years I was to remain with the troupe that became the Théâtre des Cieux. After Vitré I moved out of LeMerle’s caravan. I loved him still-there was no escaping that-but my pride forbade me to stay. By then I had a caravan of my own, and when he came to me, as I knew he would, I made him wait to be admitted, like a penitent. It was a small enough vengeance, but it changed the balance between us, and for a time I was satisfied.

We traveled along the coast, targeting markets and fairs where there was money to be had. When business was bad we sold sickness cures and love charms, or LeMerle fleeced the unwary at cards or dice. Most often we performed-snatches of ballets, masquerades, or carnival but with the occasional play growing gradually more frequent as time passed. I developed a rope-dancing act with the dwarves-a child’s game, no more, but it was popular with village audiences-and I taught my fellow dancers the simpler moves. The act grew more ambitious as we developed it, but it was my idea to take it to the high rope, and that was the beginning of our success.

At first we performed over a sheet with a dwarf at each corner, in case of accident. As our daring increased, however, we dispensed with the sheet and took to the air, not content merely to walk the rope, but dancing, tumbling, and finally flying from one rope to another by means of a series of interlinked rings. Thus, l’Ailée was fledged.

I have never been afraid of heights. In fact, I enjoy them. From a certain height, everyone looks the same-men, women, villains, kings-as if rank and fortune were simply an accident of perspective and not something ordained by God. On the ropes I became something more than human; at every performance more people came to watch. My costume was silver and green, my cloak a sweep of colored feathers, and on my head I wore a cockade of plumes that exaggerated my height still further. I have always been tall for a woman-already I overtopped everyone in the Théâtre des Cieux except LeMerle-but in my dancer’s costume I passed six feet, and when I left the gilded cage from which I began my act, children in the crowd would murmur and point, and their parents would wonder aloud that such a creature could even mount the climbing pole, let alone fly.

The rope was stretched thirty feet above their heads; below, cobbles, earth, grass. I risked broken limbs or death if I made a mistake. But l’Ailée made no mistakes. My ankle was fastened to a thin gilt chain-as if without it I might take wing and fly away. Rico and Bazuel held on to the other end, taking care to stay as far away from me as possible. Sometimes I growled and pretended to lash out, making the children scream. Then the dwarves released the chain, and I was free.

I made it effortless. Of course it was not; the smallest move takes a thousand hours of practice. But in those moments I was no longer myself. I danced on silken cords so thin that they were barely visible from the ground, using the linked rings to travel from one to the other, as Gabriel once taught me, a lifetime ago, by the orange caravan with the tiger and the lambs. Sometimes I sang, or made wild sounds in my throat. People looked up at me in superstitious awe and whispered that I must indeed be of another breed, that perhaps somewhere beyond the oceans just such a race of fox-haired harpies swooped and soared over the endless blue acres. Needless to say, LeMerle did nothing to discourage this kind of thinking. Nor did I.

As months passed, and years, our act grew in popularity until we were courted from Paris to province. It made me bold; there was nothing I would not dare. I devised wilder leaps, more breathtaking flights between the poles, leaving the others far below me. I added more levels of cord to the act: swings, a trapeze, a suspended platform. I performed in trees and over water. I never fell.

Audiences loved me. Many believed LeMerle’s fiction: that I was of another race. There were rumors of witchcraft, and a few times we were forced to leave a town in haste. But those times were few; our fame spread, and at LeMerle’s orders we moved north again toward Paris.

Two and a half years had passed since our flight from the city. Time enough, said the Blackbird, for our little contretemps to have been forgotten. Besides, he had no ambition to reenter Society; the king was getting married, and we were not alone in making for the celebrations. Every troupe in the country was doing the same: actors, jugglers, musicians, dancers. There was money to be made, said LeMerle, and with a little imagination, a little initiative, we could make a fortune.

But by this time I knew him too well to believe the simple explanation. That look was back in his eyes-the look of dangerous enjoyment he wore when planning an outrageous venture-and I was wary from the first.

“He’s hunting a tiger with a pointed stick,” Le Borgne was wont to say. “Finding it’s the easy part, but God help us all if he runs it to ground.”

LeMerle, of course, denied any such intent. “No mischief, I promise you, my Harpy,” he said, but with so much suppressed laughter in his voice that I did not believe him. “What, are you afraid?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. This is no time to start suffering from nerves.”

8

It was the height of l’Ailée’s career. We had money, fame; crowds adored us, and we were coming home. With the approach of the king’s wedding, Paris was in perpetual carnival; spirits were high; drinking deep, purses loose; and you could smell the hope and the money and, behind that, the fear. A wedding, like a coronation, is a time of uncertainty. Rules are suspended. New alliances are made and broken. For the most part, they mean little to us. We watch the big players on France’s stage, simply hoping that they will not crush us. A whim could do it; a king’s finger is heavy enough to wipe out an army. Even a bishop’s hand, cleverly wielded, may crush a man. But we at the Théâtre des Cieux did not consider these things. We could have read the signs if we had chosen to, but we were drunk on our success; LeMerle was hunting his tigers and I was perfecting a new-and increasingly dangerous-routine. Even Le Borgne was uncharacteristically cheery, and when we received word on entering Paris that His Majesty had expressed an interest in watching us perform, our elation knew no bounds.

The days that followed passed in a blur. I’ve seen kings come and go, but I’ve always had a soft spot for King Henri. Perhaps because he cheered so heartily on that day; perhaps because his face was kind. This new Louis is different: this little boy. You can buy his portrait in any market, crowned with a sun halo and flanked by kneeling saints, but he makes me fearful with his wan face and heart-shaped mouth. What can such a little boy know of anything? How can he rule France? But all that was to come; when l’Ailée performed at the Palais-Royal, we had more security, more happiness than we had enjoyed since before the wars. This marriage-this alliance with the Médicis-proved it; we saw it as a sign that our luck had turned.

It had-but not for the better. The night of our performance we celebrated with wine and meat and sweet pastries, and then Rico and Bazuel went to watch a wild-beast show near the Palais-Royal while the others got even more drunk and LeMerle went off on his own toward the river. Later that night, I heard him return, and when I passed his caravan I saw blood on the steps and I was afraid.

I tapped at the door and, receiving no answer, went inside. LeMerle was sitting with his back to me on the floor, with his shirt wadded against his left side. I ran to him with a cry of dismay; there was blood all over him. More blood, in fact, than real hurt, as I discovered to my relief. A short, sharp blade-not unlike my own-had glanced off his ribs, leaving a shallow, messy gash about nine inches long. At first I assumed he had been attacked and robbed-a man in Paris by night needs more than luck to protect him-but he still had his purse, and besides, only a very inept footpad would have dealt him such a clumsy blow. As LeMerle refused to tell me what had happened, I could only conclude that this mischief was somehow of his own making and dismiss it as an isolated case of ill fortune.

But there was more bad luck to come. The following night, one of our caravans was set on fire as we slept, and only chance saved the rest. As it was, Cateau got up for a piss and smelled smoke: we lost two horses, the bulk of our costumes, the caravan itself, of course, and one of our number: little Rico, who had got blind drunk during the evening and failed to awaken to our cries. His friend Bazuel tried to go in after him, though we could see it was hopeless from the start, but he was overcome by smoke before he even got close.

It cost him his voice: when he recovered, he was unable to speak in anything above a whisper. Even after that, I think, his heart was broken. He drank like a sponge, picked fights with anything that moved, and performed so badly in his act that in the end, we had to leave him out altogether. When, some months later, he chose to leave us, no one was surprised. And anyway, as Le Borgne said, it wasn’t as if we had lost a rope-dancer. Dwarves could always be replaced.

We left Paris furtively and in somber mood. The celebrations were far from over, but now LeMerle was eager for us to be gone. Rico’s death had affected him more than I had expected; he ate little: slept less: snapped at anyone who dared speak to him. It was the first time I had ever seen him truly angry. It was not for Rico, I soon realized-nor even for the damaged equipment-but for his own humiliation, the spoiling of our triumph. He had lost the game: and more than anything else, the Blackbird hated to lose.

No one had noticed anything on the night of the burning. LeMerle, however, had his suspicions, though he would not speak of them. Instead, he sank into a dangerous silence, and not even the news that his old enemy, the Bishop of Evreux, had been waylaid by footpads a few days before was enough to brighten his spirits.

After Paris, we made our way south. Bazuel left us in Anjou, but we gained two more people in the months that followed: Bécquot, a one-legged fiddle player, and his ten-year-old son, Philbert. The boy was a natural on the high rope, but he was too reckless; he took a bad fall later that year and was useless for months. All the same, LeMerle kept him with us through the following winter and, although the boy was never fit for the flying act again, fed him and found him useful work to do until he was finally able to place him with a group of Franciscans who, he said, would care for him. Bécquot was grateful, and I was surprised, for business had taken a bad turn and money was short. Le Borgne simply shrugged and muttered something about tigers. But, as I said, LeMerle could be sentimental about the oddest things.

We moved on. We worked markets and fairs throughout Anjou and down into Gascony, sometimes helping with harvests as we had done in the early days, staying in one place over winter. The second winter, Demiselle died of a fever, leaving us with only two dancers-at thirty, Hermine was getting too old for the high rope, and it was painful to watch her. Ghislaine tried her best but never mastered the jumps. Once more, l’Ailée flew alone.

Undaunted, LeMerle returned to playwriting. His farces had always been popular, but his plays became gradually more satirical as we journeyed across France. His favorite subject was the Church, and several times we were forced to pack up in haste as some zealous official took offense. The public, for the most part, enjoyed them. Evil bishops, lecherous friars, and religious hypocrites had always attracted appreciative audiences, and when there were also dwarves and a Winged Woman, the show never failed to bring in money.

LeMerle played the clerical roles himself-he had somehow acquired a variety of religious garments and a heavy silver cross, which must have been valuable, but which he never tried to sell, even when times were poor. It was a gift, he said when I questioned him, from an old friend in Paris. But his eyes were hard as he said it, and his smile was all teeth. I did not pursue the matter, however; LeMerle could be sentimental about the strangest things, and if he wanted a thing kept secret, then no amount of questioning would loosen his tongue. All the same, I wondered a little-especially when I was hungry and food was scarce. Then, after a while, I put it out of mind.

Now began our drifting time. We traveled south in winter, north in summer, always following markets and fairs. We changed our colors in the more hostile regions, but for the most part we were still the Théâtre des Cieux, and l’Ailée danced the high rope, and people cheered and threw flowers. Even so I sensed that my heyday was coming to an end-one year a torn tendon kept me in agony for a whole summer-but we knew we could always fall back on LeMerle’s plays. They were more hazardous than the rope act, certainly; but they earned us good coin, especially in Huguenot country.

Five more times we made the journey south; I learned to recognize the roads, the good places, the dangerous places. I took lovers where and when I chose, without hindrance from LeMerle. He still shared my bed when I wanted him to; but I had grown up a little, and my slavish adoration of him had turned to a more comfortable affection. I knew him now. I knew his rages, his triumphs, his joys. I knew him, and I accepted what he was.

I knew, too, that there was much in him to hate, much to mistrust. Twice to my knowledge, he had murdered-once a drunkard who struggled too violently to retrieve a stolen purse, once a farmer who stoned us near Rouen-both deeds committed in stealth and darkness, only to be discovered long after we had gone.

I asked him once how he reconciled such things with his conscience.

“Conscience?” He raised an eyebrow. “You mean God, Judgment Day, and that kind of thing?”

I shrugged. He knew that wasn’t quite what I meant but rarely passed over an opportunity to tease me over my heretical beliefs.

LeMerle smiled. “Dear Juliette,” he said. “If God is really up there-and if we are to believe your Copernicus, that must be a very, very long way up-then I don’t trust his perspectives. To him, I’m a speck. Down here, from where I’m standing, things are different.”

I didn’t understand, and I said so.

“I mean that I’d rather be something more than a gambling chip in a game of unlimited stakes.”

“Even so, to kill a man-”

“People kill each other all the time. At least I’m honest about it. I don’t do it in God’s name.”

Knowing him for good or ill-or so I thought-I could still love him, believing as I did that in spite of his sins, the essential heart of the man was good, was faithful to itself, a thieving blackbird singing a mocking song…But that was the man’s talent. He could make people see what they wanted to see, reflections of themselves as vain as shadows in a pond. I saw my foolish self in him, that was all. I was twenty-two, and I had not grown up half as much as I believed.

Until Épinal.

9

It is a pleasant little town on the Moselle, in Lorraine. It was the first time we had come that way, concentrating as we did mostly on the coastal regions, and we arrived in a small village called Bruyère a few miles outside the town. A quiet place; half a dozen farms, a church, orchards of apple and pear trees half-eaten by mistletoe. If I felt anything unusual I cannot recall it now; maybe a sharp glance from a woman by the roadside, a sly forking of the fingers from a child at the crossroads. I read the cards, as I did at any new spot; but I drew only a harmless Fool, a Six of Staves, and a Deuce of Cups. If there was a warning there, I did not see it.

It was August; parched summer dragging into a premature autumn turning dank and sweet with rot. Hailstorms a month earlier had crushed the ripe barley, and the fields lay spoiling in an alehouse stench. The sudden heat in the wake of the storms was overwhelming, and the people seemed dazed by the sun, blinking foolishly at our caravans as they passed. Nevertheless, we managed to negotiate a field for our camp, and that night we performed a short burlesque around our campfire, to the accompaniment of crickets and frogs.

Our audience was sparse, however. Even the dwarves barely brought a smile to the mirthless faces made bloody in the firelight, and few seemed inclined to stay afterward. The only regular entertainments in that region were hangings and burnings, according to alehouse gossip: a sow had been hanged a few days earlier for eating her young, a pair of nuns in a nearby convent had set themselves on fire in imitation of Saint Christina Mirabilis, and there was always at least one person in the pillory, so the villagers of Bruyère, inured to strong entertainments, were unlikely to be much moved by the arrival of a troupe of players.

At this LeMerle shrugged philosophically. There were good days and bad, he said, and these small villages were unused to culture. Épinal would be better.

We arrived there on the morning of the Festival of the Virgin to find the town in carnival mood. We had expected as much; after the procession and the mass the populace would retire to the alehouses and the streets, where already the celebrations were under way. This was no time for one of LeMerle’s satires-Épinal had a reputation for piety-but there might be good takings for a rope-dancer and a troupe of jongleurs. I could already see a tabor player and a flautist beneath the portals of the church, plus a masked Fool with his wand and bells and, strangely out of place, the Plague Doctor, black long-nosed mask over whitened face, his dark cloak flapping. Other than that slight note of discord, things seemed much as normal. Perhaps there was another troupe in town, I told myself, with which we might have to share the takings. I know I thought no more about them. And yet I should have recognized the signs. The black Doctor in his crow’s garb. The sounds of excitement-almost of fear-as we passed. The look in a woman’s eye as I smiled at her from my caravan, the sly fork of the hand repeated over and over…

LeMerle scented trouble from the first. I should have known-there was a reckless gleam in his eyes as he scanned the crowd, a broadness to his smile that should have checked me. It was our custom at times like this to send out the dwarves among the revelers, giving out sweetmeats and invitations to the performance, but this day he signaled for the dwarves to keep close, Le Borgne occasionally spitting fire from the tail of my caravan like a comet, Cateau calling out in his piping voice: “Players! See the players today! See the Winged Woman!”

Today, however, I could see that the crowd’s attention lay elsewhere. The procession of the Holy Mother was about to begin, and there was already a great glut of people outside the church. People lined the street on either side, some carrying images and flowers, votives or flags. The bridge too was thronged with people of the river, awaiting the ceremony. There were vendors too: sellers of pasties and cooked meats and ale and fruit. The air was thick with the smells of candle smoke and sweat, roasting meat, dust and incense, leather and onions and refuse and horses. The noise was almost unendurable. Cripples and children stood near the front, but already there were too many people, and the crowd pressed against the sides of our caravans, some looking up curiously at the painted signs and bright pennants, others shouting at us for being in their way.

I was already beginning to feel dazed; the cries of the vendors, the heat of the sun, the many stenches were too much for me, and I tried to turn back into some quieter street, but it was too late. Urged forward by the mass of worshipers, our caravans had reached the steps of the church almost at the same time the Virgin’s Day procession was due to leave. Unable to retreat or go forward I watched, curious, as the great platform carrying the Holy Mother emerged from the main door of the church and into the light.

There must have been fifty people underneath and another fifty along the sides, shoulders straining against the long poles that supported it. It was heavy and swayed as it came through the doorway; and at every slow step there came a sigh from the hooded bearers, as if the burden were almost too much to carry. The Holy Mother stood at the top of the structure on a mound of blue and white flowers, her embroidered robe gleaming in the sunlight, her hands smeared with oil and honey. A priest with a censer walked before her; a dozen monks with candlesticks came behind, singing the Ave to the wailing of an hautbois.

I had little time to follow the music, however. As soon as the procession appeared, there was a moan from the people, and we were jostled suddenly, violently, as the worshipers surged forward. “Miséricorde!” came the cry from a thousand throats, and the stench of oil and flesh and grime was overwhelming, mingling with the smoke from the silver censer, a scent of clove and holy dust. “Pity! Pity for our sins!”

I stood upon the axle of my caravan and peered across the heads of the crowd. I was beginning to feel uneasy, for although I had seen religious frenzy before, this seemed unusually ferocious, the shrill note of zeal sharpened on something shriller, closer to the bone. Not for the first time, and with an almost unconscious cupping of the new roundness at my belly, I wondered whether it was not time to leave the life we were leading before it soured completely. I was in my twenty-third year. I was no longer young.

The black Doctor flapped his cloak, keeping a blister of space between himself and the crowd, a walking emptiness, and I noticed that the cries came louder at his passage and that some fell to their knees in his wake.

“Miséricorde! Pity for our sins!” We were too close to the procession to hope for a retreat, and I steered my horse with care, keeping him dancing gingerly on the spot against the push of people, which threatened to overturn us. The Holy Mother passed slowly, lurching like a laden barge through the crowd. I saw that many of the people carrying the platform went barefoot, like penitents, although this was not usual on the Virgin’s Day. The monks were hooded like the bearers, but I noticed that one had pushed back his hood a little, and his face was red and flushed with drunkenness or exhaustion.

We stood our ground. The platform swayed as it passed us, and for a moment, standing on my axle, I was eye to eye with the Virgin, close enough for me to see the dust of years gleaming in the intricacies of her golden crown, the flaking of paint across her pink cheek. There was a spider in the hollow of one blue eye, and as I watched, it began to move slowly down her face. No one else saw it. Then she passed by.

In her wake, the frenzy was mounting, with people falling to their knees even in the press of the multitude, dragging others with them. Others took their places, the ranks closing over their heads, their cries unheard. “Miséricorde! Pity for our sins!”

A woman to my left arched backward into the crowd, eyes rolled up to the whites. For a moment she was held up like an effigy, floating effortlessly upon the outstretched hands, then she slid under and the people moved on.

“Hey!” I said. “There’s someone under there!”

Faces mooned at me without comprehension from the swell below. No one seemed to have heard me. I cracked my whip over their heads and my horse strained and pranced to stay level, eyes rolling. “There’s a woman under there! Stand back, for pity’s sake! Stand back!”

But we had been carried too far. The injured woman was already behind us, and people were thronging forward to stare at the foolish patch of space I had cleared. There came a sudden lull in sound, reducing the cries to a drone above which the Ave was briefly audible, and I thought I read in the upturned faces a kind of hope, a new relief. Then came the catastrophe.

If it had been any other than a member of the procession no one would have noticed him fall. I learned afterward that four people had been crushed underfoot during the celebrations, their heads smashed into the cobbles by the eager feet of pilgrims and revelers alike. But the procession was sacred, moving ponderously through a multitude held at bay by incense and adoration. I did not see him fall. But I heard the cry, a single note at first, then the chorus, rising in swift reaction far beyond that which we had previously witnessed. Leaping back onto the axle, I saw what had happened, although even then I did not understand its significance.

The staggering monk at the tail of the procession had collapsed. The heat, I thought vaguely, or the fumes from the censer. A group of people had gathered around the fallen man; I saw the white blur of his exposed skin as they pulled open his habit. There was a gasp and a moan, then they were moving like ripples, as fast as they could back through the ranks.

In seconds, the ripples had become a powerful undertow, reversing the flow of people so that instead of pushing toward the procession they were pushing away with all their energies, the caravans rocking in the renewed counterstruggle, some even trying to climb up out of the crowd onto the caravans in their eagerness to be gone. The procession was no longer sacred; as I watched, the line trembled and broke in several places, the Holy Mother lurching to one side, uncrowned in the burst of panic as some of her bearers deserted.

Then I heard the cry; a high-pitched ululation of grief or terror, a single voice rising above them like a clarion: “La peste! La peste!”

I struggled to hear, to distinguish words in the unfamiliar dialect. Whatever it was, it ran through the crowd like summer fire. Fights broke out as people tried to escape; others climbed the walls of the buildings lining the street-some even jumped from the sides of the bridge in their eagerness to flee. I stood up to see what was happening, but I had become separated from the other caravans. Some distance ahead I could see LeMerle lashing at his mare’s flanks, driving her onward. But the crowd had him from both sides, rocking against the caravan’s panels, lifting the wheels from the ground. Faces lurched at me out of the multitude; one caught my eye, and I was astonished at the hatred there. It was a young girl, her round red face distorted with terror and loathing. “Witch!” she shrieked at me. “Poisoner!”

Whatever it was, it was catching. I heard the cry bounce ahead of me like a stone across a lake, gathering momentum as it went, looking for somewhere to strike. The outpouring of hatred had become a tide; now it swelled against me, threatening to lift the caravan from the ground.

I was struggling with my horse; it was a quiet beast as a rule, but the girl struck it hard in the flank, and it half reared, dancing out with its heavy-shod hooves. The girl screamed; I pulled back on the horse’s harness to prevent it from trampling the people in front of me. It took all my attention and my strength-even so, the animal was panicked, and I had to whisper a cantrip into his ear to calm him-and by the time I had done with that, the girl had vanished into the crowd, and the terrible wave of hatred had moved on.

Ahead of me, though, LeMerle was in trouble. I could see him shouting something, his voice lost in the roar of the multitude, but I was too far away to understand what it was. His horse, a nervy mare, was terror-stricken; I could hear the cries of Witch! and Poisoner! above her screaming. LeMerle tried to control her, but it was beyond his skill; he was alone, cut off from the rest of us, now lashing out over the heads of the crowd with his whip, trying to force them aside. The strain proved too much for the caravan’s axle. It collapsed, toppling the vehicle; and now many hands tugged at the caravan’s fastenings, ignoring the blows from LeMerle’s whip. They had him now; there was nowhere for him to go. Someone threw a clod of earth-it hit him in the face, and he lost his balance; hands reached to drag him from his perch. Someone else tried to intervene-an official, perhaps-I thought I could make out faint cries of Order! Order! as the two factions clashed.

Throughout all this I had been shouting at the top of my voice, trying to divert attention away from LeMerle; now I urged my horse forward, heedless of the people in front of me. He saw me coming and grinned; but before I could reach him the crowd had closed in; LeMerle was lost from sight; blows fell onto him as he was dragged away.

I would have followed on foot, although he was already too far away, except that Le Borgne, who had been hiding inside the caravan as I drove through the crowd, held on to my arm. “Don’t be stupid, Juliette,” he rasped in my ear. “Don’t you know what’s going on here? Haven’t you been listening?”

I looked at him wildly. “LeMerle-”

“LeMerle can take care of himself.” His hand tightened on my arm; in spite of his size, the dwarf’s grip was painfully strong. “Listen.”

I listened. I could still hear that cry, now grown rhythmic, swelled with the stamping of many feet, like a crowd calling for a favorite actress. “La peste! La peste!”

It was only then that I understood. The outburst of terror; the fallen monk; the accusations of witchcraft. Le Borgne saw my expression and nodded. We looked at each other, and for a moment neither of us said anything. Outside, the cries redoubled.

“La peste!”

The plague.

10

The crowd was dispersing at last, leaving me still struggling to control the terrified horse. Bouffon reined in his own animal and brought it flank to flank with mine; Hermine, her caravan half overturned as she tried to cross the bridge, stood helplessly staring at the remains of a shattered wheel. Of the others, there was no sign. Perhaps they had been taken prisoner like LeMerle; perhaps they had fled.

I barely acknowledged Le Borgne’s warning. Leaping down onto the road I ran toward the tail of the procession. Half the bearers had already gone; the rest were struggling to balance the Virgin’s platform against the big marble fountain that dominated the square while ensuring the Holy Mother did not fall. I saw bodies on the road, worshipers who had been crushed against buildings or trampled underfoot. LeMerle’s caravan was lying there on its side. Of its occupant, living or dead, there was no sign.

“Mon père!” I addressed the priest as calmly as I could. “Did you see what happened? My friend was in that caravan.”

The priest looked at me in silence. His face was yellow with road dust.

“Please tell me!” I heard my voice beginning to rise. “He wasn’t doing any harm. He was trying to protect himself!”

A woman in black-one of the bearers-glanced at me scornfully: “He’ll get what’s coming to him, don’t you worry.”

“What did you say?”

“Him and the rest of his brood.” The words were barely intelligible in their thick patois. “We seen you poisoning the wells. We seen the signs.”

Behind her, the Plague Doctor stepped out of a side alley, his cloak slapping against the wall. The woman in black saw him and I caught the sign again, forked and secretive.

“Look. All I want is to find my friend. Where have they taken him?”

The woman gave a humorless laugh. “Where d’you think? The courtroom. He won’t fly away from there. None of you plague-bringers will.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I must have looked threatening then, because the woman jerked away, poking the sign at me with trembling fingers.

“Miséricorde! God protect me!”

I took a quick step forward. “Let’s see if he does, shall we?”

But the Plague Doctor’s hand was already on my shoulder, and I could hear his voice in my ear, muffled by the long-nosed mask. “Be quiet, girl. Listen to me.”

I tried to pull away, but the grip on my shoulder was unexpectedly strong. “It isn’t safe here,” hissed the doctor. “Judge Rémy burnt four witches in this square last month. You can still see the grease marks on the cobbles.”

The dry voice seemed oddly familiar. “Do I know you?”

“Quiet!” He turned away, his whitened mouth barely moving.

“I’m sure I know you.” There was something about that mouth; the thin, twisted look of it, like an old scar, which I recognized. And the smell; the dusty smell from his robes…“Don’t I?”

There came an exasperated hissing sound from behind the Plague Doctor’s mask. “Oh for pity’s sake, girl!” There it was again, that familiar voice, the clipped, precise intonation of a man who speaks many languages. He turned to me again and I could see his eyes, old and sad as a caged monkey’s. “They are looking for someone to blame,” he whispered harshly. “Leave now. Don’t even stay the night.”

He was right, of course. Players, travelers, and gypsies have always been useful scapegoats for any misfortune, be it crop failure, famine, bad weather, or plague. I learned it in Flanders when I was fourteen and in Paris, three years later. Le Borgne knew it-Rico had learned it too late. The plague had pursued us sporadically across France, but by then, the worst of it was over. It had burnt itself out during the last epidemic, and few people died of it now except the old and the sick, but in Épinal this was only the last in a series of disasters. Dry cattle, spoiled harvest, rotten fruit, rabid dogs, unseasonable weather-and now this. Someone had to be held responsible. It didn’t matter that it made no sense; plague takes more than a week to spread its corruption, and we had barely been there an hour. Nor does it spread through water, even if we had tampered with the wells.

But I already knew that no one here would listen to reason. Witchcraft was what they believed in: witchcraft and poisoning. It’s all there, in the Bible. Why look any further?

I came back to my caravan to find that Le Borgne had gone. Bouffon and Hermine too had disappeared, taking what they could of their possessions. I didn’t blame them-the Doctor’s advice was good-but I could not leave LeMerle to face the mob alone. Call it loyalty or foolish infatuation; I left the caravan where it was, led my horse to the fountain, and followed in the wake of the crowd toward the courtroom.

It was already overflowing when I arrived. People were spilling out of the doors and down the steps, scrambling upon each other in their eagerness to see, to hear. The town sergeant was standing on a podium, trying to make himself heard above the noise. Armed soldiers flanked him on either side, and between them, looking pale but self-assured as ever, was LeMerle.

I was relieved to see him still standing. His face was bruised, and his hands were tied in front of him, but some official must have intervened before much harm was done. It was a good sign; a sign that someone was in control, someone who might listen to reason. At least, I hoped so.

“Good people!” The sergeant raised his staff and signaled for quiet. “In God’s name let me speak!” He was a short, plump man with a luxuriant mustache and a mournful look. He looked to me like every other vine grower or corn merchant I had seen that summer, and even over the heads of the crowd, across the breadth of the courtroom and through the blur of their upheld arms I could see that he was trembling.

There was a lull in the noise, but it did not subside completely. Instead, several people raised their voices, calling “Hang the poisoner!” and “Hang the witch!”

The sergeant rubbed his hands together in a nervous gesture. “Good people of Épinal, peace!” he cried. “I am no more empowered to try this man than the rest of you!”

“Try him!” came a harsh voice from the back of the room. “Who said anything about that? All you need’s a rope, Sergeant, and a branch to tie it to!”

There were murmurs of approval at this. The sergeant waved his hands for silence. “You can’t just go around hanging people. You don’t even know if he’s guilty! Only the judge can-”

The harsh voice interrupted him. “What about the portents, eh?”

“Ay, what about the portents?”

“What about the plague?”

Again the sergeant appealed for calm. “I can’t make the decision!” His voice trembled like his hands. “Only Judge Rémy can do that!”

The name of Judge Rémy seemed to have achieved what the sergeant could not, and the noise sank to a dissatisfied murmur. Around me people crossed themselves. Others forked the sign. I lifted my eyes to meet LeMerle’s-I stood half a head taller than most men in the room-and I saw that he was smiling. I knew that look; had seen it more times than I could remember. It was the look of a gambler as he plays his last coin: that of a player about to begin the performance of his life.

“Judge Rémy.” His words carried effortlessly across the courtroom. “I’ve heard that name before. A man of faith, I believe.”

“Two thousand witches across nine counties!” The harsh voice came from the rear of the hall, turning heads.

LeMerle lost none of his composure. “Then it’s a pity he isn’t here now.”

“He’ll be here soon enough!”

“The sooner the better.” The townsfolk were listening, intrigued in spite of themselves. Now that he had their attention, LeMerle had a presence they found difficult to ignore. “These are dangerous times,” he said. “You’ve a right to be suspicious. Where is Judge Rémy?”

“As if you didn’t know!” brayed the voice-but some of its heat had gone, and several people called out in protest.

“Be quiet! Let’s hear the fellow speak!”

“What harm can it do to listen?”

The sergeant explained that the judge was away on business but was due back any day. When the heckler called out yet again, heads turned angrily, but no one could make out quite where he was.

LeMerle smiled. “Good folk of Épinal,” he said without raising his voice. “I am only too pleased to answer your accusations. I can even forgive your rough treatment of me”-at this he touched his bruised face-“for did not Our Lord ask us to turn the other cheek?”

“The devil may speak fine if he pleases!” It was the heckler, standing closer to the podium now but still anonymous in the wash of faces. “But let’s see if the holy words don’t blister your tongue!”

“With pleasure.” LeMerle’s reply was prompt, and voices that had hitherto joined the chorus of accusations now lifted in encouragement. “Unworthy though I may be, let me remind you before whom this court must bow. Not Judge Rémy, but a greater Judge than he. Before we begin, let us join in prayer for his guidance and for his protection in these evil times.” And with these words, LeMerle took the silver cross from out of his shirt and raised it in his bound hands.

I hid a smile. You had to admire the man. Heads bowed automatically as blanched lips mouthed the Paternoster. A tide had begun to turn for LeMerle, and when the now-familiar voice called out again, it was met with a volley of angry rejoinders, so that once again the speaker’s identity was lost. The sergeant blustered helplessly and LeMerle had to call for order.

“I demand respect for this court!” he snapped. “Is this not the way the Evil One works, spreading discord so that honest men turn on one another and make a mockery of justice?” The culprits subsided into abashed silence. “Is this not what happened only a few minutes ago, in the marketplace? Are you no better than animals?”

In the silence that followed, not even the heckler dared speak. “The Evil One is in you all,” said LeMerle, dropping his voice to a stage whisper. “I can see him. You”-he pointed to a big man with a red, angry face. “He touched you with lust. I can see it, like a worm coiled behind your eye. And you”-to a sharp-featured woman near the front, one of the shrillest of his accusers before he turned the crowd around-“I see covetousness in you, and discontent. And you, and you-” His voice had risen now and he pointed to each one in turn. “I see avarice. Rage. Greed. Pride. You lied to your wife. You deceived your husband. You struck your neighbor. You doubted the certainty of salvation.”

He had them now; I saw it in their eyes. Even so, one false move and they would be on him without mercy. He knew it too; his eyes gleamed with enjoyment. “And you!” Now he pointed to the center of the room, clearing a swath through the crowd with a sweep of his bound hands. “Yes, you, in the shadows! You, Ananias, the false witness! I see you, clearest of all!”

For ten heartbeats there was silence as we looked at an empty space. Then we saw the heckler who had until then evaded us: a grotesque figure squatting in the shadows. Its head was large, its arms apelike, its single eye blazed. The people closest to it recoiled, and as they did so, the creature sprang toward the window and swung itself high onto the ledge, hissing with fury.

“Ye outwitted me this time, devil take ye!” it cried in its raucous voice. “But I’ve not finished with ye yet, Frater Colombin!”

“God forgive us!” All around the courtroom, faces turned in wonder and disgust as people finally saw the creature that had voiced their suspicions.

“A monster!”

“The Devil’s Imp!”

The one-eyed creature spat fire from its hideous mouth. “This isn’t over, Colombin!” it shrieked. “You may have won the battle here, but in Another Place, the war goes on!”

Then the thing was gone, leaping out of the window into the courtyard below, leaving nothing but a reek of oil and smoke to prove that it had been there at all.

In the stunned silence that followed, the sergeant turned open-mouthed toward his prisoner. “Good God, I saw it! With my own eyes, so help me! The Devil’s Imp!”

LeMerle shrugged.

“But he knew you,” said the sergeant. “He spoke as if you’d met before.”

“Many times,” said LeMerle.

The sergeant stared at him. “Suppose you tell me who you are, sir,” he said at last.

“I will,” said LeMerle, beginning to smile. “But first, I’d be grateful if someone could find me a chair. A chair, and a glass of brandy. I’m tired and I’ve come a long way.”

He was a traveler, he told them, who had come to Épinal when he heard of the reputation of their evangelical judge. News of his purges, said LeMerle, had reached from coast to coast. He himself had left the seclusion of a Cistercian cloister to seek the man out and to offer his services. He spoke of visions and portents, of marvels and blasphemies encountered upon his travels. Revealed the horrors of the sabbat, of the Jews and idolaters, the slaughtered children, poisoned wells, cursed crops, blighted harvests, churches struck by lightning, babies withered in the womb, stifled in the cradle. All this he had seen, he claimed. Would any man deny it?

No one did. They had seen the Devil’s Imp with their own eyes. From its mouth they had heard his true name. In a few sentences LeMerle wove for them the tale of Brother Colombin, a man touched by God and driven to wipe out the devil’s children wherever he could find them. Traveling alone and in poverty from town to town he had uncovered the Evil One’s machinations wherever he passed, his only reward that of Satan’s defeat. Not so strange then that he should have been taken for a gypsy, traveling as he was with a group of itinerant players, brief companions of the road. Seeing the people of Épinal in disarray the Imp had sought to trick them but had failed, praise the Lord, revealing its malice to its own undoing.

I had, of course, recognized Le Borgne. Throwing his voice was another of the dwarf’s many skills, and he had used it to good effect on a number of occasions. He must have crept into the courtroom before me-like many of his kind, he could be unobtrusive when he chose-providing LeMerle with a secret ally in the crowd. It is a trick often used by conjurers and carnival magicians; we had used it ourselves in our performances. Le Borgne was a fine actor: a pity that his short-ended legs made it impossible for him ever to perform anything but burlesques and tumbling acts. I promised myself to be kinder to him in the future; he had a loyal heart, in spite of his gruff manner, and in this case, his courage and quick thinking had probably saved LeMerle’s life.

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.

11

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.

12

It was Alfonsine who saw them first. It was almost twelve o’clock, and they had to wait for the tide. Ours is not a true island; at low tide a broad pathway to the mainland is revealed, painstakingly cobbled to allow for safe passage across the flats. At least it appears safe: but there are currents across the bland surface strong enough to drag the cobbles free, sunk as they are in four feet of mortar. On both sides there is quicksand. And when the tide comes in, it sweeps the flats with terrible speed, spilling across the road and taking with it what it finds. And yet they moved with slow, relentless dignity across the sands, their progress mirrored in the shallows, the distant figures distorted in the rising column of hot air from the road.

She guessed who they were immediately. The carriage limped across the uneven causeway, the horses’ hooves struggling for purchase against the green cobbles. Before it came a pair of liveried outriders. Behind it, a single man on foot.

I had spent the morning alone on the far side of the island. Waking early and unrefreshed, I left the abbey and took Fleur for a long walk, basket in hand, to pick the tiny dune pinks, which when infused and distilled give peaceful sleep. I recalled a place where thousands of them grew undisturbed, but I was too restless for such work and I only picked a handful. In any case, the flowers were just another excuse to escape the cloister for a few hours.

As it was, we lost track of time. Beyond the dunes is a little beach of sand, where Fleur likes to play. There are broad white scars on the dune where she and I have worn away the grass, climbing and jumping, climbing and jumping, and the water is clear and shallow and filled with small jeweled pebbles.

“Can I swim today? Can I?”

“Why not?”

She swims like a dog, with shouting and splashing and great enjoyment. Mouche, her doll, watched us from the dune’s edge as I discarded my habit and joined Fleur in the water. Then I dried both of us with the skirt of my habit and picked some small, hard apples from a tree by the side of the road, for I realized that the sun was high, and we had missed lunch. Then at Fleur’s insistence, we dug a great hole, into which we flung pieces of seaweed to make a monster pit, and afterward she slept for half an hour in the shade, Mouche under her arm, while I watched over her from the duneside path and listened to the whisperings of the turning tide.

It was going to be a dry summer, I thought. Without rain, harvests would be bad; forage meager. The early blackberries were already burnt to a gray fluff on the stems. The vines too were stunted by drought, the grapes hard as dried peas. I pitied those who, like Lazarillo’s players, traveled the road in the wake of such a summer.

The road. I saw it in my mind’s eye, gilded with sunlight, strewn with the shards of my past. Was it really such a bad road? Had I suffered so much during those traveling years? I knew I had. We had endured cold and hunger, betrayal and persecution. I tried to recall those things, but still the road ahead of me gleamed like a path over quicksand, and I found myself remembering something LeMerle had once told me, in the days when we were friends.

“We have a natural affinity, you and I,” he had said. “Like air and fire, combustion is our nature. You can’t change the element you are born to. That’s why we’ll never leave the road, my l’Ailée; any more than fire can choose not to burn, or a bird leave the sky.”

But I had. I had left the sky, and for many years I had barely even raised my eyes to it. I had not forgotten, however. The road had always been there, patiently awaiting my return. And how I wanted it! What might I give to be free, to have a woman’s name once more, a woman’s life? To see the stars from a different place every night, to eat meat cooked over my own campfire, to dance-maybe to fly? I did not need to answer the unspoken question. Joy leaped in me at the thought, and for a moment I might almost have been the old Juliette once more, the one who walked to Paris.

But it was ridiculous. Leave my life, my comfortable cloister; the friends who had given me refuge? The abbey was hardly the home I had longed for, but it provided the essentials. Food in winter, shelter, work for my idle hands. And leave it for what? For a few dreams? For a hand of cards?

The path, half-sand beneath my heavy boots, dragged at my feet. I kicked at it angrily. The explanation was simple, I told myself. Simple and rather stupidly obvious. The hot weather, the sleepless nights, the dreams of LeMerle…I needed a man. That was all. L’Ailée had had a different lover every night, choosing as she would-smooth or rough, dark or fair-and her dreams were scented and textured with their bodies. Juliette too was a sensual creature: Giordano scolded her for bathing naked in the rivers, for rolling in the morning grass, and for the secret hours she spent with his Latin poets, struggling with the unfamiliar syntax for the sake of the occasional taut glimpse of Roman buttock…Either of them would have known how to dispel this malaise. But I-Soeur Auguste, a man’s name and an old man, at that-what do I have? Since Fleur there have been no more men. I might have turned to women for comfort, like Germaine and Clémente, but those pleasures never appealed to me.

Germaine, whose husband cut her face fifteen times-once for every year of her life-with a kitchen knife when he found her with another girl, hates all men. I’ve seen her watching me. I know she finds me beautiful. Not like Clémente, of the Madonna face and filthy mind, but enough to please her. She sometimes watches me at work in the garden, but never says a word. Her light hair is cropped shorter than a boy’s, and beneath the ungainly brown robes I can guess at a slim, graceful figure. Once, Germaine would have made a fine dancer. But something else is spoiled besides her face. Six years after the incident she looks older than I, her mouth pale and thin, her eyes almost colorless, like brine. She tells me she joined the convent so that she would never have to look at a man again. But she is like the sour apples and the dried-pea grapes, yearning to flourish but starved of rain.

Lovely, spiteful Clémente sees it and makes her suffer, flirting with me as I go about my duties. In chapel she sometimes whispers words of seduction, offering herself to me as, behind her, Germaine listens helplessly, stolid in her suffering, her scarred face impassive.

Germaine has no faith, no interest in religion of any kind. I spoke to her once about my female God-I thought it might appeal to her, hating men as she did-but she seemed as indifferent to that as she was to the rest. “If such a thing ever was,” she told me dryly, “then men have remade her. Why else should they want to lock us up and to make us ashamed? Why else should they be so afraid?”

I said that men had no reason to be afraid of us, and she gave another sharp laugh. “Oh no?” She put her fingers to her face. “Then why this?”

Perhaps she is right. And yet I don’t hate men. Only one, and even he…I dreamed of him again last night. So close I could smell his sweat and his skin, smooth as my own. I hate him, and yet in my dream he was tender. Even with his face in shadow I would have known him anywhere, even without the moonlight that gilded the scorched flower on his arm.

The sound of birdsong awoke me. For an instant I was there again, before Épinal, before Vitré, with the blackbirds singing outside our caravan and my lover watching me with all of summer in his mocking eyes…

For a moment only. A sly succubus crept into my heart as I lay asleep. A ghost. There can be no part of me that still wants him, I tell myself.

No part at all.

It was long past noon when at last we arrived at the abbey. I had taken off my wimple, but even so my hair was damp with sweat, my robe clammy against my skin. Fleur trotted beside me, Mouche dangling from one hand. There was no one in sight. Given the heat, this was not unusual, for many of the sisters, in the absence of authority, had taken to sleeping at that time, leaving what rudimentary duties they still performed until after Nones and the cooler evening. But when I saw the fresh horse dung by the abbey gate and the tracks of carriage wheels in the dust I was suddenly certain that what we had been expecting had finally happened.

“Is it the players coming back?” asked Fleur hopefully.

“No, sweetheart, I don’t think so.”

“Oh.”

I smiled at her expression, and gave her a kiss. “Play here for a while,” I said. “I have to go inside.”

I watched her as she ran duck-footed along the path into the cloister, then turned toward the Abbey, feeling as if a great weight had been taken from me. At last, then, this uneasy, unsettled time had come to an end. We had a new abbess, a guiding hand for us in our aimlessness and fear. I could picture her already. She would be calm and strong, though no longer in the first blush of youth. Her smile would be grave and tranquil, but with the touch of humor necessary to lead so many disaffected women toward peace. She would be kind and honest, a good mainland woman, unafraid of hard work, her brown hands callused but deft and gentle. She would enjoy music and gardening. She would be hardheaded; experienced enough in the world’s ways to help us fend for ourselves and yet not too ambitious, not embittered by her knowledge but still able to face the world with simple joy, simple wisdom.

Looking back in amazement at my own simplicity, I realize my fanciful picture owed a great deal to memories of my own mother, Isabelle. Her remembered face has altered a little since I last saw her, I know. Only the eye of love could recall her as I do, so sweet and so strong, her beauty crystallizing in my mind so that she is far lovelier than Clémente or the Holy Mother herself, though I cannot quite remember the color of her eyes, or the contours of her strong brown face. I put my mother’s head onto the shoulders of our new abbess before I even set eyes on her, and the relief I felt was like that of a child left too long in charge of a task too great for her, who, at last, sees her mother coming home. I began to run toward the strangely quiet building, my hair flying and my robes pulled up around my knees.

The cloister was dark and cool. I called out as I entered, but there was no reply. The gatehouse was unoccupied; the abbey seemed deserted. I ran down the broad, sunny slype between the dorters but saw no one. I passed the refectory, the kitchens, the empty chapter house, making my way toward the church. It would be almost time for Sext, I told myself; perhaps the new abbess had called a meeting.

As I approached the chapel I heard voices and chanting. Suddenly wary, I pushed open the door. All the sisters were present. I could see Perette; Alfonsine with her thin hands clasped at her chin; fat Antoine with her moony face and weak, excited eyes; stolid Germaine with Clémente at her side. There was silence as I came in and I blinked, disorientated by the dark and the reek of incense and the faces reflected in the light of many candles.

Alfonsine was the first to move. “Soeur Auguste,” she exclaimed. “Praise God, Soeur Auguste. We have a new-” Her voice broke in what might have been excitement. I was already looking beyond her, my eyes moving eagerly in search of the wise, bright lady of my expectation. But beside the altar I saw only a young girl of eleven or twelve, her small, pallid face impassive beneath a neat white wimple, her hand held out in a limp gesture of benediction. “Soeur Auguste.” The voice was as small and cool as its owner, and I was suddenly very aware of my hoydenish appearance, of my flying curls, my glowing cheeks.

“Mère Isabelle.” Alfonsine’s voice quavered with self-importance. “Mère Isabelle, the Reverend Mother.”

For a second, my surprise was such that I almost laughed aloud. She could not be speaking of this child. The thought was absurd-this child with my mother’s name must be some novice, some protégée of the new abbess who must even now be smiling at my mistake…Then our eyes met. Hers were very light but without brilliance, as if all her vision were turned inward. Looking into her wan young face I could see no gleam of humor, no pleasure, no joy.

“But she’s so young!” It was the wrong thing to say. I knew it immediately and regretted it, but in my surprise I had spoken my thought aloud. I saw the girl stiffen, her lips half open to reveal small, perfect teeth. “Ma mère, I am sorry.” Too late to unsay my words, I knelt to kiss the pale outstretched hand. “I spoke without thinking.”

I knew even as I felt the cool fingers beneath my lips that my apology was not accepted. For a moment I saw myself through her eyes: a sweating, red-faced island woman, hot with the forbidden scents of summer.

“Your wimple.” Her coldness was catching, and I shivered. “I-I lost it.” I faltered. “I was in the fields. It was hot…”

But her attention was already elsewhere. Her pale eyes moved slowly, incuriously across the faces turned in expectation toward her. Alfonsine watched her with an adoring expression. The silence was like ice.

“I was Angélique Saint-Hervé Désirée Arnault,” she said in a small, expressionless voice, which nevertheless penetrated me to the bone. “You may think me young for the part God has chosen for me. But I am God’s mouthpiece here, and he will give me the strength I need.”

For an instant I felt sorry for her, so young and defenseless, trying so hard to maintain her dignity. I tried to imagine what her life must have been, reared in the oppressive climate of the Court, surrounded by intrigue and corruption. She was a thin little thing: their banquets and sweetmeats, the guinea fowl basted with lard, the pies, the pièces montées, the trays of peacocks’ hearts and baked foie gras and larks’ tongues in aspic only serving to sharpen her disgust of their excesses. A sickly child, not expected to survive beyond her teens, drawn to the Church through its ceremony, its dark fatalism, its intolerance. I tried to imagine what it must be like for her, cloistered at twelve, repeating as if by rote the pronouncements of her religious tutors, closing the door on the world before she even understood what it had to offer.

“There has been enough laxity here.” She was speaking again, her nasal intonation sharpening as she strained to be heard. “I have seen the records. I have seen what manner of indolence my predecessor was pleased to tolerate.” She glanced briefly in my direction. “I intend to change this from today.”

There was a low murmur among the sisters as her words reached them. I caught sight of Antoine, her face slack with puzzlement.

“First,” continued the girl, “I wish to mention the matter of dress.” Another sharp flick of the eyes in my direction. “I have already noticed a certain-carelessness-among some of you, which I consider unbefitting to members of our sisterhood. I am aware that the previous abbess tolerated the wearing of the quichenotte. This practice will cease.”

To my right, old Rosamonde turned a bewildered face toward me. Light from the window above her fell onto her white bonnet. “Who is this child?” Her thin voice was querulous. “What is she saying? Where is Mère Marie?”

I shook my head fiercely at her, miming silence. For a moment she seemed about to continue, then her wrinkled face crumpled, her eyes moist. I heard her mumbling to herself as the new abbess continued: “Even in so short a time I cannot help but notice certain irregularities in procedure.” The nasal voice might have been reading from an ecclesiastical textbook. “Mass, for example. I find it difficult to believe that for a matter of years no mass at all has been said in the abbey.”

There was an uneasy silence.

“We said prayers,” said Antoine.

“Prayers are not enough, ma fille,” said the child. “Your prayers cannot be sanctified without the presence of a minister of God.”

I could feel laughter pressing against my belly at every word she spoke. The ridicule of the situation momentarily overturned my sensation of unease. That this sickly child should preach to us, frowning and pursing her lips like an old prude and calling us her daughters was surely a monstrous joke, like the valet dressing in his master’s clothes on Fools’ Day. Christ in the temple was surely another such travesty, preaching contrition when he should have been running in the fields or swimming naked in the sea.

The child-mother spoke again. “Henceforth mass will be celebrated every day. Our eight daily services will be resumed. There will be fasting for all on Fridays and on holy days. I’ll not have it said that my abbey was ever a place of indulgence or excess.”

She had found her voice at last. The reedy treble had taken on a demanding note, and I realized that behind her wan self-importance there was hidden a kind of zeal, almost of passion. What I had taken for shyness I now recognized as high-bred contempt of the type I had not heard since I was at Court. My abbey. I felt a stab of annoyance. Was the abbey her plaything, then, and were we to be her dolls?

My voice was sharper than I intended as I spoke out. “There’s no priest but on the mainland,” I said. “How can we have mass every day? And who’ll pay for it if we do?”

She looked at me again and I wished I had not spoken. If I had not already made an enemy of her, I thought, this scornful outburst must surely have tipped the balance. Her face was a tight bud of disapproval.

“I have my own confessor with me,” she said. “My good mother’s confessor, who begged to come with me to help in my work.” I could have sworn that as she spoke she flushed a little, her face slightly averted and a touch of animation coloring her flat voice. “Let me introduce Père Colombin de Saint-Amand,” she said with a small gesture toward the figure that only now detached itself from the shadow of a pillar. “My friend, teacher, and spiritual guide. I hope he will soon become as dear to you all as he is to me.”

As I stood there transfixed, I saw him with perfect clarity, the harlequin colors from the rose window illuminating his face and hands. His black hair was longer than I remembered, secured at the nape of his neck with a ribbon, but the rest was as my heart recalled him; the turn of his head into the light, the straight black brows, the woodland eyes. Black becomes him; consciously dramatic in his priest’s robe, unadorned but for the gleam of his silver cross, he fixed his gaze directly at me and gave a small, audacious smile.