The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley

by The Serpent Garden (epub)

“Yes, we’ve already gotten a letter from her. It’s an excuse, of course, but I don’t see why not. What about just before eventide, in two nights’ time? You will do her service, and me too.” My heart started pattering. I must have looked pale.

  “I’m not good at this sort of thing. I’d rather paint.”

  “Oh, you won’t be alone. You see, we have already had hints that something might happen, but we didn’t know when. Now that we do, I just want you to be there and tell me all that is said, afterwards.” My mouth started to open, but nothing came out. “Oh, come, come, now. A story I can hear anywhere, but your imitation of voices is the drollest I’ve heard. I assure you, they’ll never reach her. Our family must preserve its good name.”

  “I am most grateful for your patronage, and am your loyal servant in all things.” In response, Marguerite smiled knowingly.

  The Hôtel de Cluny is walled, a haven from the ocean of poverty that surrounds it, but those very walls conceal the secret of their own penetration. The ancient Roman palace that forms their base has made the walls above a honeycomb of secret avenues that lead into the cellars of the Hôtel. Not all these are negotiable: aqueducts filled with mud, collapsed corridors filled with a rubble of ancient brick and stone. But the Priory of Sion holds the secrets to these depths just as it holds the greater Secret. Hidden ways have been cleared beneath this section of the city; unlit candles are placed at intervals in niches along the ancient corridors, and at a widening of a tunnel that leads upward to a cellar door between two buildings in an alley, an old oil lamp with a deep reservoir is kept perpetually lit by the man in black. These are not the only secret ways beneath Paris: from the Hôtel Saint-Pol similar tunnels lead to the Bastille and Vincennes; the kings of France have been no less careful to preserve their exit than the Priory.

  Now the Priory’s secret avenues were readied to carry the destruction of the Valois. Everyone was at their stations: the torches in the underground chamber were lit, the lanterns for the ascent sat flickering on the great meeting table. And in the lowest cellar of the Hôtel de Cluny, a stout woman leaned on the handle of an immense warming pan, glancing furtively, every so often, at the door of a storage cupboard set in the stonework.

  Outside, in the snowy alley between two shabby old tenements, two men stamped and shivered in the early winter dusk.

  “Where is she?” whispered one. “Madame de Nevers leaves in the quarter hour, and Maître B—”

  “Shh. The ‘Fox.’”

  “The Fox is due with The Egg at any moment.”

  “Hssst. That’s him.” But it was not Maître Bellier, the arch-conspirator. A heavily cloaked woman, poor and deformed, clutching a tightly swaddled baby, came limping through the snow from the street. A shabby hood shaded her head almost down to her eyes; her face was white with some fatal illness.

  “True Blood,” whispered the woman, giving the password.

  “Forever,” repeated the conspirators, giving the countersign.

  “The Fox has sent me. This is The Egg,” whispered the woman. The baby in her arms was very still.

  “Is it alive?” asked one man, lifting the blanket that covered the infant’s face. He found himself peering into a pair of lively brown eyes, far too clever and knowing for a newborn baby. “Ah, nice and healthy. It’s a boy?”

  “Of course,” whispered the woman feebly. “My own dear newborn son, who has cost me my life in giving birth.” Hmm. That explains how pale she is, thought the conspirators.

  “The blessings of heaven will be upon you. Your son will live better than you can ever imagine. You may rest content that he will be well looked after. As well looked after as a king, in fact.”

  “Oh, a thousand blessings, you fine gentlemen.” The woman paused to wipe away a tear. “Farewell, my son, be good, and don’t make a sound.” Silently, she turned away, her face pink with suppressed laughter, and limped histrionically down the alley back into the street. Poor woman, she was hunchbacked, too.

  The two men vanished down the cellar opening, made a turn, and just where the light failed, found candles waiting to be lit at the feeble flame of an oil lamp. There the modern tunnel joined a square, tile-paved segment of Roman waterway, which seemed to descend forever into the bowels of the earth. Hunched over, clutching the silent, bundled up baby, they made their way down the slimy, dripping path to an opening cut in the wall behind the lion fountain in the chamber below.

  “True Blood,” they whispered.

  “Forever,” came the answer, and gloved hands reached for the bundle while they clambered down the last step behind the lion’s head.

  “It’s sleeping,” said a man, not anxious to rouse the infant. He put his head to its chest. “It breathes well.”

  “A sound boy, purchased this morning. And very like the late king in looks, they say.” The whispering echoed in the chamber over the melancholic plink, plink, of the single drops from the lion’s mouth into the pool. Torchlight shimmered across the black waters. Silently, the two shortest conspirators took their lanterns from the table and entered the marble-framed door beneath an eagle with outstretched wings. They turned, and soon the passage became narrower, following the line of an ancient arcade filled with rubble, whose collapsing arched roof of brick formed the ceiling of the tunnel. They bent double, cradling the precious burden. At one spot they were so near the surface that a cold wind pierced the tunnel, and an old woman staring at the icy garden beneath her window thought she had seen a ghost when the glow from their light passed the narrow space in the subterranean arcade roof that had been pried open by the roots of fruit trees. They turned again, and the tunnel became larger and danker, smelling of old earth. Here it ended, obstructed by a stout wooden door. The first man scratched lightly on the door. “True Blood,” he whispered.

  “Forever,” came the answering whisper of a woman’s voice. The door was opened, and they stood in a vaulted stone cellar filled with kegs. A man held a torch over the sleeping bundle.

  “It’s very quiet. Is it alive?”

  “Oh, very lively. It’s sleeping.” The baby made the oddest hiccuping sound as it slept beneath its blanket. It was almost like laughter, except that newborn babies don’t laugh.

  “Yes, I hear it now. Here, hold the pan. Yes, it just fits.” The stout woman was holding an immense warming pan, meant to hold hot coals to take the chill off the sheets. A deep kettle with an iron lid on a long, wooden handle, it was the only container big enough to hold a child that would not be searched. Every evening it had been carried to the bedchamber, full of hot coals. No guard would risk searing his hand to inspect it. The conspirators popped the sleeping baby inside it and put the lid on. There it was, enclosed in iron, the child who would change their futures and the future of France. How much depended on it! Soon France would have a new heir, and a new queen regent. Francis would be pushed away from the throne. The Priory and its leader would control the government and destroy Francis, the last of the Valois, as soon as it was politic.

  Awed by the significance of the moment, the two men watched the torch bob and vanish up the stairway into the service corridors of the Hôtel de Cluny, then they slipped silently back into the depths to report to the Helmsman.

  It was already dusk when I arrived with my escort in the stone-walled courtyard of the Hôtel de Cluny. A footman met me at the entrance and carried my box, showing me the way through all those winding little rooms to the White Queen’s chamber. Outside, several guards were lounging just as if they expected nothing. Madame de Nevers had just left for the evening, and a maid came to turn down the bed and warm the sheets.

  “Stop,” said the guards as I came to the door. “We need to see what’s in there first.” I set my box on the floor. “And you, too,” they said to the stout woman with the warming pan.

  “Just hot coals,” said the woman. “You’ll burn your fingers if you touch the lid.”

  “We’ll risk it,” said a guard, and I heard a lazy chuckle from behind me. It was the Sie
ur de Périgord, who was acting for Madame Louise. The woman looked suddenly nervous.

  “You’ll be sorry,” she said. But a guard had put his hand on the pan.

  “Stone cold,” he said, as he opened the lid.

  It was then that something very strange happened, which is still rather hard for me to describe. There was a fluttering sound as if a dove or a live duck had suddenly been released from the pan, and a child’s voice cried, “Surprise!” and started to chirp like a bird, only considerably more melodious. The guards fell back from the pan, which dropped on the floor with a “clang!” while the lid rolled clattering away. The poor woman who’d brought it fell on the floor in a faint. “Oh, I’m a lovely, lovely, baby!” sang the little voice, and we looked up to see a sort of little winged creature with dark curls and lively, dancing brown eyes fluttering beneath the high, vaulted stone ceiling like an oversized moth, or a very large sparrow that’s come in the chimney by mistake. In that moment, an idea flashed into my mind. Hadriel’s behind this, I thought. This is his sense of humor. How ever did he discover this conspiracy? It must have been the poorest-kept secret in all of Paris.

  One of the soldiers crossed himself. The Sieur de Périgord, who is very dignified, called out, “Stay! Who or what are you? Identify yourself.” I could hear someone muttering a prayer. By this time, a lady’s head had popped out of the White Queen’s door.

  “Oh, my dear God, a conspiracy!” she cried. “What on earth is that?” Behind her, a redheaded figure in a crumpled white gown stood, trying to peer out.

  “The queen is out of bed. Get back, get back, no excitement now!” cried someone, and the woman at the door turned to give a hard stare at the girl in white behind her.

  “Did you have that thing brought?” asked the old lady who was her keeper for the night. Above us, the little winged thing danced joyfully in the air. I noticed that the stout lady who had brought the warming pan had revived. In the new confusion, she managed to evade the guards and disappear.

  “Send for a wild duck in a warming pan? I hardly think so,” I heard the White Queen say with a sniff before the door slammed.

  “What a splendid, splendid trick!” the little thing in the air sang. “Tell the Helmsman to look more closely at the next baby he buys! He shall never be king! Hadriel has said it!” With a flash of iridescent wings, the creature vanished straight through the solid stone of the ceiling.

  “What was that? Was it talking?”

  “A kind of chirping.”

  “It must have been a bird. Yes, a big bird.”

  Hadriel. He was right here in Paris, and he hadn’t even come to say hello. Now was that fair, when I had been painting so hard, and was so in need of inspiration? Irresponsible, that’s what it was, just plain irresponsible. Playing tricks like that and fooling around. He was probably drinking, that’s what. But how was I going to tell the duchess what happened without seeming out of my mind?

  Evidently, everyone else had had the same thought. They were busy fixing their story right now.

  “They tried to smuggle a baby in a warming pan.”

  “Yes, a baby.”

  “But when the woman was discovered, she fled before anyone could catch her.”

  “Very fast. Probably a boy in disguise, she was so fast.”

  “Yes, a boy, dressed in woman’s clothes.”

  “She took the baby.”

  “Yes, just snatched it away.”

  “She made a diversion.”

  “Yes, a live bird flew in the chimney.”

  “There’s no chimney here.”

  “It flew in the chimney in the antechamber, then came in here when the boy came with the warming pan.”

  “…and so, you see, something large and winged was put in the pan, instead of the baby that the conspirators had obviously thought they’d put in there, and it just flew out, and someone shouted ‘A trick! Next time let the Helmsman look more closely at the baby he buys!’ so everyone thinks that it had to be a baby that was there once.” I had gone to the Palais, where Francis had moved after the king died in Les Tournelles, so it couldn’t be used anymore. The duchess, seated in her big padded chair by the fire, nodded and smiled at my story. Several of her ladies were there, too, the same ones she liked to debate about Virtue and Perfect Love and such things with.

  “It ends well at least. Someone has a sense of humor. Someone who knows the conspirators and is on our side. That is very discreet.”

  “If you ask me, that conspiracy was hatched by men.”

  “And what do you mean by that?” she asked.

  “Well, only a man could count so poorly where babies are concerned. No woman would try to palm off a baby on someone less than four months since the wedding day.” The ladies laughed until tears ran down their faces, and then wiped their eyes on their silken, fur-lined sleeves.

  “That’s what I told Mother,” said Duchess Marguerite. “Oh, she was so angry when she heard the rumors! ‘I swear, I’ll have them all hanged!’ she cried, but I just said, ‘Let them hatch their plot and smuggle anything they like in. What sane woman would accept an infant who would testify only to the fact that she was not pure on her wedding day?’”

  “Now there is nothing to mar the coronation of the king, your brother,” said one of her ladies agreeably.

  “At least nothing of that sort,” said Marguerite. “The Helmsman. I wonder who that is and why on earth he’d try such a ridiculous scheme?”

  On the Left Bank, not far from the Hôtel de Cluny, a perpetually scrawny student of theology was most curiously occupied in his icy little garret room. On the floor, he had inscribed about him a circle with his dinner knife, surrounded by words in Hebrew and Latin copied from the grimoire he now held in his hand. A smoking bowl of evil herbs, rue, mandrake, and hellebore root, sat on the floor before him. Outside the circle a little lead coffer, no broader than a man’s palm, lay open. Slowly and carefully, so that he wouldn’t make a mistake, Nicholas was reading aloud:

  “By the Seal of Basdathea, by the name Primematatum which Moses uttered and the earth opened and swallowed up Corah, Dathan and Abiram, answer all my demands and perform all that I desire. Come now, O demon Belphagor, peaceably and in fair form, without delay.”

  “You beastly little nit, what do you think you are doing?” Belphagor, in a half doublet marked with tailor’s chalk, appeared outside the circle. “I was at my tailor’s having a new suit of clothes made for the coronation. Now send me back and I won’t punish you.”

  “You can’t punish me anyway. This book says so.” With a start, Belphagor noticed the grimoire in Nicholas’s hand.

  “Throw that thing out. Didn’t you learn in school it’s bad to try things you haven’t studied? You could get into big trouble.”

  “I’m already in big trouble, as far as I can see. You said you wanted someone to read to you to improve your level of civiliation, but all I’ve read so far is pornography and Machiavelli, and now my soul’s in danger.”

  “Throw away that book, dear Nicholas, and I’ll take you out to supper and all’s forgotten, all right? The book doesn’t work anyway.”

  “It works well enough, because here you are. I don’t know if I’d call what you are ‘in fair form,’ though. Hmph. That nose. Those big feet of yours. Hardly fair at all.”

  “Nicholas, Nicholas. Think a moment. Stick with me, and you’ll have all the riches of the earth. Just throw away the book, and step out here and we’ll shake on it. Agreed?”

  “Step out of the circle? It specifically says not to, right here on page thirty-two.”

  “Damned bookworm! Who said you should read page thirty-two?”

  “I always read the whole thing before I try something new. I read all of Machiavelli, too, even if you didn’t sit long enough to let me finish. He says if men are bad, you are not bound to keep good faith with them. And you’re bad. Tell me, what’s worse than a demon? You deceived me. So that shows I don’t have to keep good faith with you. Lord Be
lfagoro from Italy, indeed!”

  Belphagor shot forth a jet of sulfurous fire from his nostrils, but it dissipated harmlessly at the edge of the magic circle.

  “You crawling, cretinous idiot! You spineless, maggot-ridden heap of worm food. Die, you miserable mound of human garbage! Die!”

  “Worthless talk, Belphagor. I have the grimoire, and my soul, too. Now, into the little box there.”

  “Never.”

  “‘O worthless spirit, who art wicked and disobedient, by the Names of Adonai, Sebaoth, Adonai, Amioram, Adonai, King of Kings, commands thee…’” Nicholas read. Even though his knees trembled, his voice was firm. He thought of his old mother and all the sacrifices she’d made for his studies. I can’t be a preacher if I can’t box this demon, he thought, and he read the rest of the demon-catching spell loud and clear. “Pull the lid shut after you,” he said, as Belphagor collapsed into a column of greenish, stinking smoke and shrank into the box. Carefully, Nicholas touched the box with the rod he had prepared according to the grimoire’s instructions. “‘Seal, O seal, until the crack of doom, let no mortal words undo thee, by the dreadful Day of Judgment, by the Sea of Glass which is before the face of the Divine Majesty, by the Four Beasts before the Throne, having eyes before and behind, by the Fire which is about the Throne, by the Holy Angels of heaven and the Mighty Wisdom of God….’” The little box was jiggling and vibrating with the rage of the demon inside it. Gingerly, Nicholas stepped out of the circle.

  “Nice job, Nicholas,” said Hadriel’s cheerful voice. The angel appeared sitting cross-legged on Nicholas’s unmade bed, and suddenly Nicholas wished he were a better housekeeper, though he had been terribly busy getting all the evil herbs and studying in the last few days. “You know, even we angels can’t do that. Humanity does have some advantages.”

  “I should hope so,” said Nicholas, somewhat miffed. “I mean, we do have immortal souls and such.”

  “Which, if you forget, had to be redeemed,” said Hadriel.